Aligning Language Models with Investor and Market Behavior for Financial Recommendations

Abstract: Most financial recommendation systems often fail to account for key behavioral and regulatory factors, leading to advice that is misaligned with user preferences, difficult to interpret, or unlikely to be followed. We present FLARKO (Financial Language-model for Asset Recommendation with Knowledge-graph Optimization), a novel framework that integrates LLMs, Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) to generate asset recommendations that are both profitable and behaviorally aligned. FLARKO encodes users' transaction histories and asset trends as structured KGs, providing interpretable and controllable context for the LLM. To demonstrate the adaptability of our approach, we develop and evaluate both a centralized architecture (CenFLARKO) and a federated variant (FedFLARKO). To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of combining KTO for fine-tuning of LLMs for financial asset recommendation. We also present the first use of structured KGs to ground LLM reasoning over behavioral financial data in a federated learning (FL) setting. Evaluated on the FAR-Trans dataset, FLARKO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation baselines on behavioral alignment and joint profitability, while remaining interpretable and resource-efficient.