TempFinRAG: Multimodal Temporal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Point-in-Time Financial Question Answering

Abstract

Financial question answering is often treated as document question answering, although financial evidence is both multimodal and time-dependent. Semantically equivalent facts expressed in narrative text, tables, page images, or Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) should support consistent answers, whereas a disclosure may support a query only after becoming public. We formalise this combination as crossmodal evidence symmetry under a causal temporal boundary and introduce TempFinRAG, a multimodal temporal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for point-in-time financial question answering. Given a question, company, and as-of date, the framework enforces the information boundary defined by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing availability; aligns page layout, text, table structure, and XBRL facts; retrieves time-valid evidence; executes auditable financial calculations; and generates a cited answer. A verifier checks temporal validity, claim support, numerical consistency, and the need to abstain. We further introduce TempFinQA, a point-in-time evaluation protocol built from public filings and XBRL facts, and evaluate the framework on complementary evidence-grounded, numerical, conversational, and multi-table benchmarks. On TempFinQA, TempFinRAG improves answer accuracy from 66.7% to 78.9% over hybrid RAG while reducing temporal evidence leakage from 10.8% to 1.7% and hallucination from 17.3% to 7.9%. Reliable financial question answering therefore requires consistent treatment across evidence representations and deliberately asymmetric access across time.