Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models
Authors: Danny Halawi, Fred Zhang, Chen Yueh-Han, Jacob Steinhardt
AI-generated Key Points
- Researchers focus on optimizing a retrieval-augmented language model system for accurate forecasting of future events
- Aim to determine if language models can match the performance of competitive human forecasters
- Process involves fine-tuning a reasoning model by collecting a large dataset of forecasts and selecting subsets where the model outperforms human crowds
- Data generation for fine-tuning involves running the system at each retrieval date in the schedule with multiple configurations for data augmentation
- Optimization procedure includes generating candidate outputs per input, selecting best reasoning-prediction pairs, and fine-tuning the model on strong forecasts
- Fine-tuning data structure consists of inputs containing questions, descriptions, resolution criteria, and summarized articles; target outputs comprise reasoning and predictions
- Acknowledgments to individuals who contributed helpful discussions and feedback on an early draft of the paper; support from various institutions is also acknowledged
- Retrieval system detailed in four steps: search query generation, news retrieval using APIs, relevance filtering and re-ranking, text summarization
- Goal is to gather historical articles relevant to forecasting tasks
- Researchers strive to enhance system's performance for accurate forecasting at scale through rigorous optimization procedures and data collection efforts
Abstract: Forecasting future events is important for policy and decision making. In this work, we study whether language models (LMs) can forecast at the level of competitive human forecasters. Towards this goal, we develop a retrieval-augmented LM system designed to automatically search for relevant information, generate forecasts, and aggregate predictions. To facilitate our study, we collect a large dataset of questions from competitive forecasting platforms. Under a test set published after the knowledge cut-offs of our LMs, we evaluate the end-to-end performance of our system against the aggregates of human forecasts. On average, the system nears the crowd aggregate of competitive forecasters, and in some settings surpasses it. Our work suggests that using LMs to forecast the future could provide accurate predictions at scale and help to inform institutional decision making.
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