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LLM Output Drift: Cross-Provider Validation & Mitigation for Financial Workflows

Khatchadourian, Raffi, Franco, Rolando

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Financial institutions deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) for reconciliations, regulatory reporting, and client communications, but nondeterministic outputs (output drift) undermine auditability and trust. We quantify drift across five model architectures (7B-120B parameters) on regulated financial tasks, revealing a stark inverse relationship: smaller models (Granite-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B) achieve 100% output consistency at T=0.0, while GPT-OSS-120B exhibits only 12.5% consistency (95% CI: 3.5-36.0%) regardless of configuration (p<0.0001, Fisher's exact test). This finding challenges conventional assumptions that larger models are universally superior for production deployment. Our contributions include: (i) a finance-calibrated deterministic test harness combining greedy decoding (T=0.0), fixed seeds, and SEC 10-K structure-aware retrieval ordering; (ii) task-specific invariant checking for RAG, JSON, and SQL outputs using finance-calibrated materiality thresholds (plus or minus 5%) and SEC citation validation; (iii) a three-tier model classification system enabling risk-appropriate deployment decisions; and (iv) an audit-ready attestation system with dual-provider validation. We evaluated five models (Qwen2.5-7B via Ollama, Granite-3-8B via IBM watsonx.ai, Llama-3.3-70B, Mistral-Medium-2505, and GPT-OSS-120B) across three regulated financial tasks. Across 480 runs (n=16 per condition), structured tasks (SQL) remain stable even at T=0.2, while RAG tasks show drift (25-75%), revealing task-dependent sensitivity. Cross-provider validation confirms deterministic behavior transfers between local and cloud deployments. We map our framework to Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) requirements, demonstrating practical pathways for compliance-ready AI deployments.


Natural Language Query Engine for Relational Databases using Generative AI

Fotso, Steve Tueno

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The growing reliance on data-driven decision-making highlights the need for more intuitive ways to access and analyze information stored in relational databases. However, the requirement of SQL knowledge has long been a significant barrier for non-technical users. This article introduces an innovative solution that leverages Generative AI to bridge this gap, enabling users to query databases using natural language. Our approach automatically translates natural language queries into SQL, ensuring both syntactic and semantic correctness, while also generating clear, natural language responses from the retrieved data. By streamlining the interaction between users and databases, this method empowers individuals without technical expertise to engage with data directly and efficiently, democratizing access to valuable insights and enhancing productivity.


Practical token pruning for foundation models in few-shot conversational virtual assistant systems

Qi, Haode, Qian, Cheng, Ni, Jian, Singh, Pratyush, Fazeli, Reza, Wang, Gengyu, Shu, Zhongzheng, Wayne, Eric, Bross, Juergen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In an enterprise Virtual Assistant (VA) system, intent classification is the crucial component that determines how a user input is handled based on what the user wants. The VA system is expected to be a cost-efficient SaaS service with low training and inference time while achieving high accuracy even with a small number of training samples. We pretrain a transformer-based sentence embedding model with a contrastive learning objective and leverage the embedding of the model as features when training intent classification models. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results for few-shot scenarios and performs better than other commercial solutions on popular intent classification benchmarks. However, generating features via a transformer-based model increases the inference time, especially for longer user inputs, due to the quadratic runtime of the transformer's attention mechanism. On top of model distillation, we introduce a practical multi-task adaptation approach that configures dynamic token pruning without the need for task-specific training for intent classification. We demonstrate that this approach improves the inference speed of popular sentence transformer models without affecting model performance.