LLMs Can Teach Themselves to Better Predict the Future

We present an outcome-driven fine-tuning framework that enhances the forecasting capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without relying on human-curated reasoning samples. Our method leverages model self-play to generate pairs of diverse reasoning trajectories and probabilistic forecasts for a set of diverse questions that resolve after the models' knowledge cutoff date. We then rank pairs of these reasoning traces by their distance to the actual outcomes before fine-tuning the model via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). On a separate test set, our approach increases prediction accuracy of Phi-4 14B and DeepSeek-R1 14B by between 7--10\% over a base model and a DPO fine-tuned control model with randomized labels, bringing them on par with forecasting capabilities of much larger frontier models like GPT-4o.

@article{turtel2025_2502.05253,
  title={ LLMs Can Teach Themselves to Better Predict the Future },
  author={ Benjamin Turtel and Danny Franklin and Philipp Schoenegger },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05253},
  year={ 2025 }
}