Code-Interactive Visual Reasoning for Financial Candlestick Understanding

Abstract

Financial candlestick understanding requires locating visual elements, aligning them across trading dates and panels, and combining observations through numerical and financial reasoning. Answer accuracy alone does not reveal whether predictions are supported by chart evidence. We introduce Code-Interactive Financial Candlestick Reasoning and present Fin-Thinker, a model based on Qwen3.5-9B that generates and executes code to acquire evidence and perform computations. The model uses the returned observations to guide subsequent reasoning. To train these capabilities, we construct FinKLine-32K with 32,184 replay-verified code-observation trajectories collected through teacher-guided student exploration. These include successful solutions with and without error recovery. Our three-stage training framework combines foundational visual-code fine-tuning, financial process supervision of successful reasoning and corrective continuations, and execution-feedback reinforcement learning. For evaluation, we introduce FinKLineBench with 1,200 questions across 138 financial task types to assess answer correctness, code execution, and evidence grounding separately. On FinKLineBench, Fin-Thinker improves strict accuracy by 13.1 and 33.2 percentage points over the best-performing direct-answer baseline among those evaluated and its base model with sandbox access, respectively. Training-stage ablations further show that financial process supervision and execution-feedback reinforcement learning yield successive improvements in both answer accuracy and GPT-5.6-judged grounded accuracy.