arXiv:2509. 10600v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collegiate cross country teams often build their season schedules on intuition rather than evidence, partly because large-scale performance datasets were not publicly accessible prior to the National Running Club Database (NRCD).
arXiv:2608. 14776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collegiate running in the United States generates thousands of race results annually in cross country and track and field, yet no large-scale dataset has been publicly available for research.
arXiv:2607. 26061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-match tactical decision-making in professional football relies heavily on subjective expert analysis and identity-based scouting systems that cannot generalize to unseen teams.
The study introduces a framework that reconciles minute‑resolution athlete monitoring data with injury labels that are only available at the session level. By creating fixed‑time landmarks (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 minutes) and generating a single representation per athlete‑session up to each landmark, the authors evaluate several machine‑learning models and data‑augmentation strategies on elite women’s football data. Results show that discrimination varies across landmarks, with TabPFN outperforming Logistic Regression at later landmarks but not consistently beating Random Forest, and that synthetic augmentation offers benefits only in specific conditions.
The paper demonstrates that the outcome of a forecasting leaderboard is largely determined by the evaluator’s design choices rather than the models themselves. By fixing the data, horizon, and period, the authors varied three key evaluation decisions—unit of analysis, error pooling, and scoring metric—and showed that each can reverse or eliminate the apparent superiority of any forecasting method. The study also evaluates the practical impact of these choices on a deployed system, revealing that the selection rule captures a significant portion of the potential performance gain, and confirms the findings on an external public dataset.
arXiv:2607. 06495v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Live sports commentary is grounded generation under a deadline: statements concern real, named athletes, the grounding state changes every few seconds, and no reference text exists at generation time.
arXiv:2608. 03416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are now regularly asked to forecast real-world events, but comparisons are often difficult because models receive different information, use different tools, and are evaluated under different rules.
The paper introduces a landmark-based approach for classifying injury-associated athlete sessions using minute-resolution multimodal football monitoring data. Instead of labeling every minute, it creates a single representation per athlete-session at fixed time points (landmarks) that incorporates information up to that moment, thereby aligning the session-level injury label with the data. Experiments on 3,743 elite women's football athlete-sessions from the 2020 SoccerMon dataset evaluate various representation strategies and machine learning models, reporting ROC-AUC values between 0.367 and 0.607 and PR-AUC values between 0.0080 and 0.0150, with notable uncertainty across landmarks.
arXiv:2607. 17765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce WC2026-Agents, a benchmark and dataset for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as autonomous forecasting agents on real, future events.
The paper audits the Duckworth‑Lewis‑Stern (DLS) method, the standard for revising cricket scores after rain, using 8,150 international matches to generate 233,550 synthetic interruption scenarios. It finds two structured biases: a 137‑run prediction error range across match‑state buckets and a gender‑differential bias in ODIs, with women’s scores over‑predicted by an average of +7.63 runs versus +1.51 runs for men. The authors benchmark DLS against five modern machine‑learning models and introduce DLS‑Cal, a lightweight calibration layer that reduces overall bias by 31% in ODIs and 19% in T20Is, and a gender‑aware variant that nearly eliminates the residual bias for women’s ODIs.
The paper introduces a landmark‑based approach to classify injury‑associated athlete sessions using minute‑resolution multimodal football monitoring data. Instead of labeling every minute, it creates a single representation per athlete‑session at fixed time points (landmarks) based on information up to that moment, thereby aligning the session‑level injury label with the data. Experiments on 3,743 elite women’s football sessions show that cumulative and dynamic logistic regression models achieve ROC‑AUCs between 0.367 and 0.607, though results carry wide uncertainty.
Time-series foundation models are evaluated almost exclusively on public archives that predate them, so a strong score cannot be separated from having seen the test set during pretraining. The obvious...
arXiv:2607. 16597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid digitalisation of elite sport has created new opportunities for integrating artificial intelligence (AI), performance analytics, and decision-support systems into athlete development and competition management.