arXiv AI

Predictive Credit: Measuring What Scientific Explanations Add to Experimental Forecasts

The study evaluates how scientific explanations influence experimental forecasts by comparing paired predictions that share the same intervention, forecaster, and outcome but differ in description, matched explanation, and donor context. Across 336 prospective states, 12 Tox21 endpoints, and 24 OpenML tasks, the predictive credit of explanations was largely inconclusive, with key metrics such as ROC AUC interval-score and point-equivalence rules unmet. While certain model variants (e.g., DeepSeek V4 Pro) reduced drift and improved some error metrics, overall matched point-accuracy gains and natural-explanation credit remained unconfirmed at the tested donor resolutions.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Discover, Falsify, Revise: Auditing Input-Use Claims from Source Code to Predictive Contribution in Agent-Discovered Cell Models

The paper introduces CELLAUDIT, a method for auditing whether inputs claimed to influence predictive models actually do so. By testing if an input can enter the computation, whether predictions depend on it, and if that dependence improves observed responses, the authors evaluate agent-generated predictors on a morphology‑transcriptomics benchmark (BBBC047). Their findings show that many models claim compound contributions that are not supported by the data, and that falsification‑guided revisions can recover genuine input effects while improving performance.

By Mengran Li, Bo Li, Chengyang Zhang, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Xu, Zhenchao Tang
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

FinForesight: A Diagnostic Backtesting Benchmark for Deep Research Systems in Financial Forecasting

FinForesight is a diagnostic backtesting benchmark designed to evaluate deep research systems for financial forecasting. It tests four forecasting tasks—valuation, return ranking, event direction, and future financial fundamentals—across Chinese, U.S., and Hong Kong markets, while also including two diagnostic tasks for counterfactual reasoning and financial calculation. The framework limits evidence to what was available at the forecast date and compares pretraining-era, post-cutoff, and live evaluations to assess how well controlled backtests predict future performance.

By Fengyuan Liu, Mukai Li, Jieshun You, Yilin Zheng, Chenjia Min, Yizhou Zhang, Harper Chen, Qi Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Ceiling Is in the Channel: Auditing Learner Gaps and Measurement Frontiers in Clinical Prediction

The paper introduces a framework that distinguishes two causes of saturation in clinical prediction: a learner gap, where the model fails to use available information, and a measurement‑channel ceiling, where the recorded variables limit performance. It provides theoretical characterizations, finite‑sample diagnostics, and empirical audits across three large cohorts, showing that well‑tuned models approach the frontier while deficient learners leave large gaps. A PRISMA‑guided synthesis across 104 tasks reveals consistent channel‑level patterns, suggesting that improving the learner or the measurement channel can audit and potentially lift performance.

By Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Nusrat Jahan, Snehasis Mukhopadhyay, Shiaofen Fang, Vijay R. Ramakrishnan
arXiv AI
Aug 21

Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay

arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.

By Haiyue Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 23

TimeLitmus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Cross-Modal Understanding and Explanation Faithfulness in Event-Conditioned Time-Series Prediction

arXiv:2609.24677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make predictions from numerical time-series histories and textual events. Yet accuracy alone cann...

By Jie Gong, Maowei Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Yankai Chen, Guojun Xiong, Xue Liu, Min Peng, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou
arXiv AI
Oct 2

On the Divergence of Accuracy and Mechanism Consistency in Time Series World Models

The paper introduces a formal framework and benchmark for time‑series world models (TSWMs) that separates state, actions, and exogenous inputs, and defines a new metric called mechanism consistency to evaluate whether model predictions move in the expected direction when actions change. Experiments on eight public datasets show that using a frozen latent prediction space and gated output fusion improves prediction accuracy, while prediction error and mechanism consistency often diverge, with the best‑performing models sometimes failing to exhibit consistent directional responses. Adding a directional supervision loss significantly boosts mechanism consistency without affecting mean‑absolute error, providing a practical recipe for building more reliable TSWMs.

By Haochen Zhang, Jiaheng Guo, Zhen Xu, Zachary Plotkin, Nicholas Konz, Zhen Tan, Tianlong Chen