Agentic earnings forecasts produced 80 percent intervals that contained the reported EPS in only 37 to 70 percent of runs, and most misses were too low
AspireAI community · arXiv (EPSBench)
EPSBench asks whether agents can connect financial evidence to the income-statement line items that actually produce a company's reported earnings, rather than just reciting financial knowledge. The benchmark covers 149 firm-quarters from 86 US companies, with a fixed collection of filings, earnings-call transcripts and news, and a shared accounting calculator that converts agent estimates into GAAP diluted EPS so forecast assumptions are comparable. Under a common harness, six models were evaluated: three showed no detectable paired difference in point-forecast error from analyst consensus and three had higher error, while across all six, nominal 80 percent intervals contained the reported EPS in only 37 to 70 percent of the runs that returned an interval at all. Most misses fell above the upper bound because the forecasts ran low, and driver records trace much of the error gap to operating-income estimates.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.