In plain words: A compact language model is trained by rewarding it only when its forecasts of real-world events turn out right, using recent prediction-market questions and news headlines. It matched the biggest AI models and was better calibrated, with simulated bets earning over 10%.
Abstract · Outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to Predict the Future
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been an effective approach for improving Large Language Models' reasoning in domains such as coding and mathematics. Here, we apply RLVR methods towards forecasting future real-world events - a challenging task for RL due to the very noisy (and delayed) outcomes involved. Using a novel dataset of recent questions from a prediction market, and accompanying relevant news headlines, we show that a compact (14B) reasoning model can be trained to match or surpass the predictive accuracy of frontier models like o1, while greatly improving probabilistic calibration. The model's performance is also practically meaningful: in a Polymarket trading simulation, we estimate that its bets would have yielded a return on investment of over 10% across all questions in the test set. We detail and compare approaches used in training our model, including augmenting our training-data with synthetic prediction questions, guardrails for learning stability, and median prediction sampling at inference-time.
Benjamin Turtel, Danny Franklin, Kris Skotheim, Luke Hewitt, Philipp Schoenegger
arXiv:2505.17989 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted May 23, 2025 · updated Dec 1, 2025
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Eliminate all agents, all sources of change, all complexity - anything that could introduce unpredictability, and it suddenly becomes far easier to predict the future, no?