Boxiang Zhao

Boxiang Zhao, Qince Li, Zhonghao Wang et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the capability to faithfully translate natural language into rigorous structured formats-essential for tool invocation-and to convert complex tabular information into machine-readable specifications has become paramount. However, current evaluations lack effective methodologies to measure this structural fidelity without costly human intervention, as traditional text metrics fail to detect semantic drift in code-like outputs. This paper proposes Table-BiEval, a novel approach based on a human-free, self-supervised evaluation framework, to assess LLMs performance quantitatively. By leveraging deterministic Intermediate Representations, our framework calculates Content Semantic Accuracy and Normalized Tree Edit Distance to decouple structure from content. Also, it empirically evaluates 15 state-of-the-art LLMs across dual topological dimensions-hierarchical structures and flat tables. The results reveal substantial variability, highlighting that mid-sized models can surprisingly outperform larger counterparts in structural efficiency and confirming that deep recursive nesting remains a universal bottleneck for current architectures.

Boxiang Zhao, Qince Li, Zhonghao Wang et al.

While Large Language Models excel at semantic tasks, they face a critical bottleneck in financial quantitative reasoning, frequently suffering from "Arithmetic Hallucinations" and a systemic failure mode we term "Cognitive Collapse". To strictly quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Cognitive Complexity Benchmark (CCB), a robust evaluation framework grounded in a dataset constructed from 95 real-world Chinese A-share annual reports. Unlike traditional datasets, the CCB stratifies financial queries into a three-dimensional taxonomy, Data Source, Mapping Difficulty, and Result Unit, enabling the precise diagnosis of reasoning degradation in high-cognitive-load scenarios. To address these failures, we propose the Iterative Dual-Phase Financial-PoT framework. This neuro-symbolic architecture enforces a strict architectural decoupling: it first isolates semantic variable extraction and logic formulation, then offloads computation to an iterative, self-correcting Python sandbox to ensure deterministic execution. Evaluation on the CCB demonstrates that while standard Chain-of-Thought falters on complex tasks, our approach offers superior robustness, elevating the Qwen3-235B model's average accuracy from 59.7\% to 67.3\% and achieving gains of up to 10-fold in high-complexity reasoning tasks. These findings suggest that architectural decoupling is a critical enabling factor for improving reliability in financial reasoning tasks, providing a transferable architectural insight for precision-critical domains that require tight alignment between semantic understanding and quantitative computation.