Reading Is Not Using: Retrieval, Judgment, and AI Financial Research

--> [Submitted on 25 Aug 2026] Title:Reading Is Not Using: Retrieval, Judgment, and the Design of AI Financial Research Workflows View a PDF of the paper titled Reading Is Not Using: Retrieval, Judgment, and the Design of AI Financial Research Workflows, by Miao Liu and Zhizhe Liu View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as AI analysts to process financial disclosures and support AI-assisted investment decisions. Yet such systems are usually evaluated by what they can retrieve, not whether retrieved information affects their judgments. We identify a retrieval-integration gap in long-context financial analysis. Holding focal-firm information fixed and varying only unrelated context from 2,000 to 128,000 tokens, we find that a risk disclosure's influence on investment judgments falls to the experimental noise floor even as direct retrieval remains accurate. The pattern replicates across model families and judgment tasks and in experiments removing real disclosures from actual 10-K filings. More capable models postpone but do not eliminate the gap. Causal memory interventions show that compressed summaries and source-text lookup jointly transmit disclosures into judgments. Workflow architecture determines whether this transmission succeeds: chunk-and-summarize pipelines evict relevant information, whereas a targeted, structured restatement adjacent to the decision restores its influence. AI analyst performance is therefore jointly determined by model capability and workflow architecture. Retrieval-based evaluations can certify systems whose investment judgments ignore information they demonstrably retrieved. Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ACM classes: I.2.7; H.3.3; H.4.2 Cite as: arXiv:2608.24842 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2608.24842v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24842 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Zhizhe Liu [view email] [v1] Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:31:25 UTC (610 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Reading Is Not Using: Retrieval, Judgment, and the Design of AI Financial Research Workflows, by Miao Liu and Zhizhe Liu View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Loading... Data provided by: Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)