arXiv:2608. 05030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge.
By Shaopeng Liang
Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge. Dynamic Poisson-family models estimate team strength, expected goals, and coherent score probabilities, but do not directly understand roles, tactical matchups, motivation, or how a first goal changes behaviour.
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.
By Jiacheng Ding, Cong Guo, Jason Xu
arXiv:2607. 18084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting a football match before kickoff requires more than knowing past results: a model must use changing information and make a clear prediction before the answer is available.
By Zhaokai Wang, Tianlin Gui, Jiayuan Rao, Shangzhe Di, Yihong Tang, Dingli Liang
The paper presents a validated protocol for adapting drone‑based crowd‑counting models to the extreme conditions expected at the 2034 FIFA World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Using 525 controlled runs and a full‑resolution corpus, the authors demonstrate that label‑free adaptation can recover 31‑49% of shift‑induced error across multiple corruptions and severities, achieving a 41.8 MAE improvement over a frozen source model. They also introduce a severity law, a stability budget, and a flux‑based risk module that detects real congestion episodes, culminating in a six‑point deployment protocol for safe aerial crowd monitoring.
By AlAnoud AllGhayth, AlJawharh AlOtaibi, Jude AlSubaie
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) used as judges in absolute scoring tasks exhibit systematic biases that compromise reliability. It shows that a judge’s task accuracy strongly predicts both its judging accuracy and its directional bias, yet more capable examinee models consistently receive more lenient judgments. To mitigate these biases, the authors propose a calibrated weighted majority voting (WMV) ensemble that estimates judges’ error rates from inter-judge agreement patterns, achieving near-oracle performance without labeled data and improving both accuracy and fairness.
By Gemma Zhang, Prachi Badarayani, Asmi Kumar, Sadid Hasan, Sulaiman Vesal