# FinGEAR: Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval

Source: [FinGEAR: Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7b581e209131cea87ee8>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T07:01:39.544Z

Authors: Ying Li, Mengyu Wang, Miguel de Carvalho, Sotirios Sabanis, Tiejun Ma

Published: 2025-09-15T15:25:26.000Z

## Abstract

Financial disclosures such as 10-K filings present challenging retrieval problems due to their length, regulatory section hierarchy, and domain-specific language, which standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models underuse. We introduce FinGEAR (Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval), a retrieval framework tailored to financial documents. FinGEAR combines a finance lexicon for Item-level guidance (FLAM), dual hierarchical indices for within-Item search (Summary Tree and Question Tree), and a two-stage cross-encoder reranker. This design aligns retrieval with disclosure structure and terminology, enabling fine-grained, query-aware context selection. Evaluated on full 10-Ks with queries aligned to the FinQA dataset, FinGEAR delivers consistent gains in precision, recall, F1, and relevancy, improving F1 by up to 56.7% over flat RAG, 12.5% over graph-based RAGs, and 217.6% over prior tree-based systems, while also increasing downstream answer accuracy with a fixed reader. By jointly modeling section hierarchy and domain lexicon signals, FinGEAR improves retrieval fidelity and provides a practical foundation for high-stakes financial analysis.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Information Retrieval on FinanceBench 150 samples](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/information-retrieval-on-financebench-150-samples.md>): Information Retrieval; FinanceBench 150 samples; DocRec@5: 87.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12042>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12042.pdf>)