ForecastBench: A Dynamic Benchmark of AI Forecasting Capabilities

Ezra Karger, Houtan Bastani, Chen Yueh-Han, Zachary Jacobs, Danny Halawi, Fred Zhang, Philip Tetlock

Keywords: language models, evaluation, benchmark, forecasting, LLM, decision-making, datasets

TL;DR: We build a dynamic benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to forecast future events

Abstract: Forecasts of future events are essential inputs into informed decision-making. Machine learning (ML) systems have the potential to deliver forecasts at scale, but there is no framework for evaluating the accuracy of ML systems on a standardized set of forecasting questions. To address this gap, we introduce ForecastBench: a dynamic benchmark that evaluates the accuracy of ML systems on an automatically generated and regularly updated set of 1,000 forecasting questions. To avoid any possibility of data leakage, ForecastBench is comprised solely of questions about future events that have no known answer at the time of submission. We quantify the capabilities of current ML systems by collecting forecasts from expert (human) forecasters, the general public, and LLMs on a random subset of questions from the benchmark ($N=200$). While LLMs have achieved super-human performance on many benchmarks, they perform less well here: expert forecasters outperform the top-performing LLM ($p$-value $<0.001$). We display system and human scores in a public leaderboard at www.forecastbench.org.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 11678