InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain
  Instruction Tuning
Yi Yang Yixuan Tang Kar Yan Tam
We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on
LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset
related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou
et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset,
covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial
Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative
finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding
financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions.
Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate
InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial
models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of
financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research
perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be
tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained
foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis
(Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a
state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding
financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing
the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters
to the research community.