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CFQA: A Chinese Financial Question Answering Benchmark from Corporate Annual Reports

We present CFQA, a Chinese financial question answering benchmark constructed from 50 publicly listed companies’ annual reports spanning 2023–2025. The benchmark comprises 500 questions, derived by applying 10 question templates to each source document, and covers five categories: fact extraction, enumeration, comparative calculation, judgment verification, and reasoning analysis. All gold-standard answers are manually annotated and grounded in the source reports. To illustrate benchmark utility, we evaluate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system against a no-retrieval baseline, and introduce a rule-based consistency detector that distinguishes fabricated content from other error types. RAG improves average answer accuracy from 7.53% to 8.07%, with the most consistent gains observed in fact extraction and judgment verification tasks for domain-adapted models. Crucially, by decoupling exact-match accuracy from evidence-support judgments, our detector reveals that despite low absolute scores, RAG architectures successfully constrain model confabulation, exhibiting remarkably low true fabrication rates. However, performance gains in higher-order cognitive tasks, such as comparative calculation and reasoning analysis, remain non-significant across evaluated models, highlighting the boundaries of current retrieval-augmented systems in complex financial reasoning. The dataset, annotation guidelines, and evaluation code are publicly released.