Learning to Aggregate Zero-Shot LLM Agents for Corporate Disclosure Classification

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that a supervised aggregator can effectively combine diverse zero-shot LLM outputs to improve corporate disclosure classification, outperforming individual classifiers and baseline methods.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-prompt framework and a trained meta-classifier that enhances zero-shot LLM predictions for financial sentiment analysis.

Findings

Aggregator improves balanced accuracy from 0.566 to 0.606.

Combining diverse zero-shot outputs yields better results than individual classifiers.

Supervised aggregation provides the largest gains in mixed-signal disclosures.

Abstract

This paper studies whether a lightweight supervised aggregator can combine diverse zero-shot large language model outputs into a stronger downstream signal for corporate disclosure classification. Zero-shot LLMs can read disclosures without task-specific fine-tuning, but their predictions often vary across prompt perspectives, model families, and confidence levels. I examine this problem with a multi-prompt framework in which three fixed zero-shot LLM classifiers read each disclosure from different financial perspectives and output a sentiment label, a confidence score, and a short rationale. A logistic meta-classifier then aggregates these outputs to predict next-day stock return direction. To reduce pretrained-model contamination, I restrict evaluation to a post-release sample of 9{,}860 U.S.\ corporate disclosures issued by large publicly traded firms between January 2025 and March 2026, after the release of the frozen base LLMs used in the experiment. Results show that the trained aggregator outperforms single classifiers, majority vote, confidence-weighted voting, a zero-shot LLM judge, and a FinBERT baseline. Balanced accuracy rises from 0.566 for the best single classifier to 0.606 for the trained aggregator. The gain is largest in mixed-signal disclosures where classifiers disagree. The results suggest that zero-shot LLM outputs contain complementary financial signals, while also showing that the strongest gains come from supervised aggregation rather than from zero-shot voting alone.