AveniBench: Accessible and Versatile Evaluation of Finance Intelligence

Mateusz Klimaszewski, Pinzhen Chen, Liane Guillou, Ioannis Papaioannou, Barry Haddow, Alexandra Birch

Abstract: Over the last few years, there has been great interest in applying large language models (LLMs) to problems in the finance industry, and the field needs a robust LLM benchmark to support this work. Current financial LLM benchmarks contain simple tasks which are not representative of real use cases and have test sets with licences that do not allow commercial use. In response, we release AveniBench, a permissively licensed benchmark that tests a group of six key finance-related skills: tabular reasoning, numerical reasoning, question answering, long context modelling, summarisation and dialogue. We refactor the test sets to ensure that metrics are comparable, providing a unified framework. Furthermore, AveniBench introduces two task difficulty modes, easy and hard, enabling scalable evaluation based on real-world deployment needs. We use our benchmark to evaluate a diverse set of 20 widely used LLMs, from small open-weight models to proprietary systems like GPT-4. This evaluation initiates our public leaderboard, providing valuable insights for future academic research and commercial development.