Unlocking Data Value in Finance: A Study on Distillation
and Difficulty-Aware Training
Average score across Financial benchmarks. ODA-Fin-RL/SFT-8B demonstrates strong performance relative to thinking models with significantly more parameters.
This repository provides ODA-Fin-SFT-8B, a financial language model trained on high-quality Chain-of-Thought data. For the reinforcement learning version, see ODA-Fin-RL-8B.
📖 Overview
ODA-Fin-SFT-8B is an 8B-parameter financial language model built on Qwen3-8B, fine-tuned on the ODA-Fin-SFT-318K dataset—a meticulously curated corpus of 318K samples with high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces distilled from Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking. This model establishes a robust foundation for financial reasoning, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across diverse financial tasks.
🎯 Key Highlights
Base Model: Qwen3-8B
Training Data: ODA-Fin-SFT-318K (318K samples with verified CoT)
Training Method: Supervised Fine-Tuning with full-parameter updates
Avg Performance: 72.1% across 9 financial benchmarks
Key Strengths:
Balanced performance across general financial understanding, sentiment analysis, and numerical reasoning
Serves as optimal initialization for subsequent RL training
@misc{cao2026unlockingdatavaluefinance,title={Unlocking Data Value in Finance: A Study on Distillation and Difficulty-Aware Training},author={Chuxue Cao and Honglin Lin and Zhanping Zhong and Xin Gao and Mengzhang Cai and Conghui He and Sirui Han and Lijun Wu},year={2026},eprint={2603.07223},archivePrefix={arXiv},primaryClass={cs.LG},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07223},}
📄 License
This model is released under the Apache 2.0 License. The training data (ODA-Fin-SFT-318K) aggregates from 25+ open-source repositories, each with their own licenses.
🤝 Acknowledgments
We thank the creators of DianJin-R1-Data, Agentar-DeepFinance-100K, financial_phrasebank, Finance-Instruct-500k, and others. We also thank the Qwen team for the powerful Qwen3 series models.