Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models for Financial Time Series Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper introduces FinSrag, a retrieval-augmented framework with a domain-specific retriever for financial time series forecasting, significantly improving stock movement predictions by capturing complex market patterns.

Contribution

The paper presents FinSeer, a novel domain-specific retriever, and integrates it with StockLLM, a fine-tuned language model, to enhance financial time series forecasting accuracy.

Findings

FinSeer outperforms existing retrieval methods in accuracy.

Retrieval-augmented approach improves stock prediction performance.

Enriched datasets capture broader market dynamics.

Abstract

Accurately forecasting stock price movements is critical for informed financial decision-making, supporting applications ranging from algorithmic trading to risk management. However, this task remains challenging due to the difficulty of retrieving subtle yet high-impact patterns from noisy financial time-series data, where conventional retrieval methods, whether based on generic language models or simplistic numeric similarity, often fail to capture the intricate temporal dependencies and context-specific signals essential for precise market prediction. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinSrag, the first retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework with a novel domain-specific retriever FinSeer for financial time-series forecasting. FinSeer leverages a candidate selection mechanism refined by LLM feedback and a similarity-driven training objective to align queries with historically influential sequences while filtering out financial noise. Such training enables FinSeer to identify the most relevant time-series data segments for downstream forecasting tasks, unlike embedding or distance-based retrieval methods used in existing RAG frameworks. The retrieved patterns are then fed into StockLLM, a 1B-parameter LLM fine-tuned for stock movement prediction, which serves as the generative backbone. Beyond the retrieval method, we enrich the retrieval corpus by curating new datasets that integrate a broader set of financial indicators, capturing previously overlooked market dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that FinSeer outperforms existing textual retrievers and traditional distance-based retrieval approaches in enhancing the prediction accuracy of StockLLM, underscoring the importance of domain-specific retrieval frameworks in handling the complexity of financial time-series data.