Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence
Abstract
As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.14355,
title = {Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence},
author = {Xueqing Peng and Zhuohan Xie and Yupeng Cao and Haohang Li and Lingfei Qian and Yan Wang and Vincent Jim Zhang and Huan He and Xuguang Ai and Linhai Ma and Ruoyu Xiang and Yueru He and Yi Han and Shuyao Wang and Yuqing Guo and Mingyang Jiang and Yilun Zhao and Youzhong Dong and Xiaoyu Wang and Yankai Chen and Ye Yuan and Qiyuan Zhang and Fuyuan Lyu and Haolun Wu and Yonghan Yang and Zichen Zhao and Yuyang Dai and Fan Zhang and Rania Elbadry and Ayesha Gull and Muhammad Usman Safder and Nuo Chen and Fengbin Zhu and Tianshi Cai and Zimu Wang and Polydoros Giannouris and Yuechen Jiang and Zhiwei Liu and Mohsinul Kabir and Yuyan Wang and Yixiang Zheng and Yangyang Yu and Weijin Liu and Wenbo Cao and Anke Xu and Peng Lu and Jerry Huang and Mingquan Lin and Prayag Tiwari and Yijia Zhao and Victor Gutierrez Basulto and Xiao-Yang Liu and Kaleb E Smith and Jiahuan Pei and Arman Cohan and Jimin Huang and Yuehua Tang and Alejandro Lopez-Lira and Xi Chen and Xue Liu and Junichi Tsujii and Jian-Yun Nie and Sophia Ananiadou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14355},
year = {2026}
}