Forecasting Benchmarks

While established literature underscores the pivotal role of preprocessing in forecasting accuracy, this stage remains largely overlooked in current research. Modern benchmarks typically resort to simple scaling, failing to account for critical transformations required to address nonstationarity, such as differencing. This omission creates a significant structural preprocessing bias that favors models with built-in data treatments while obscuring the true potential of simpler architectures. We study this effect through a preprocessing-aware benchmark that evaluates 11 forecasting models across 16 reversible preprocessing pipelines on 29,000 M4 time series. Our results identify preprocessing as a key driver of forecasting performance. Optimizing preprocessing per series yields gains of approximately 27% to 87% across all evaluated models, with architectures lacking internalized preprocessing experiencing the most substantial improvements. This allows simpler architectures to become highly competitive with complex, state-of-the-art models in modern forecasting benchmarks. All resources and experimental results from this benchmark are stored in a comprehensive metadataset to support future metalearning tasks.

Public redispatch records provide empirical data for grid congestion forecasting, but delayed reporting, zero-inflated distributions, and temporal shift present major modeling challenges. We assess the accuracy and reliability of probabilistic machine-learning forecasts using published German transmission records under experimentally imposed information-age constraints. The benchmark evaluates eight daily series of upward and downward intervention energy across four German transmission system operators from 2021 to 2024 (48,242 eligible records; 354 evaluation dates in 2024). We compare seasonal empirical, regularized autoregressive (ARX), quantile LightGBM, GRU, and Transformer models under a minimum seven-day target-latency constraint. Neural architectures use a zero-censored output head to accommodate exact-zero outcomes. Static, rolling, and adaptive delayed-feedback calibration are evaluated using normalized weighted interval score (nWIS), empirical coverage, and block-bootstrap inference. Raw LightGBM achieved nWIS 0.7952, outperforming ARX (1.0604) and the seasonal baseline (0.8739) by 25.0% and 9.0%, respectively (Holm-adjusted p<0.005). Rolling calibration improved LightGBM to nWIS 0.7767 versus 0.8251 for static calibration (p=0.0092), with 91.81% coverage for nominal 90% intervals. The zero-censored Transformer achieved nWIS 0.8161, with no significant difference from LightGBM (p=0.260). However, aggregate coverage concealed substantial undercoverage during high-volume interventions (61.91% coverage among above-threshold events). These results show that boosted-tree models with rolling calibration provide accurate probabilistic forecasts of aggregate redispatch volumes under target delays, while nominal aggregate validity does not ensure reliability during extreme congestion events.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to meet a key goal in economics: a quantitative model of household decision making, across a variety of settings. Yet existing evaluations cover few surveys and outcomes, and do not study how households adjust to changing economic conditions. We introduce a new evaluation, HouseholdBench, which unites 6 U.S. household surveys and 32 prediction tasks spanning numeric, categorical and probabilistic outcomes, related to consumption, income, labor, expectations, and housing. Using past behavior, demographics and macroeconomic conditions, the tasks test whether LLMs predict behavior, including how households adjust to changes in various policies. We evaluate 13 proprietary and open-weight LLMs against a no-change baseline and a gradient-boosted tree model. Most LLMs outperform the no-change baseline, including for policy response tasks -- with the best model lowering error for numeric outcomes by 12.2%. Across most tasks, gradient-boosted trees rank first; leading proprietary LLMs approach their performance, but open-weight models lag. LLMs exhibit systematic over- and underprediction across different tasks. We identify methods that enable a 4 billion parameter open-weight model to match proprietary models' performance: fine-tuning and aggregating 16 predictions per observation. Improvements generalize to policy-response tasks, which are excluded from fine-tuning. We release our datasets, code, and leaderboard on our website: https://jn-huang.github.io/householdbench

Post-wildfire debris flows (PFDFs) are destructive sediment-laden hazards triggered when intense rainfall strikes recently burned terrain, destabilizing hillslopes and threatening infrastructure, local economies, and community safety. Data-driven methods have been proposed to learn predictive patterns directly from historical PFDF observations. However, the current research landscape of data-driven PFDF prediction remains highly fragmented across feature spaces, model architectures, and evaluation protocols, making rigorous comparison and the derivation of scientific insights difficult. Moreover, existing studies lack a systematic investigation into the relative importance of heterogeneous factors (e.g., meteorological conditions, terrain characteristics, soil properties, and burn severity) in triggering PFDF. To address these limitations, we present a unified benchmark for data-driven PFDF prediction, enabling fair and comprehensive evaluation across diverse models and feature configurations. Furthermore, to better understand the underlying drivers of PFDF formation, we propose a reinforcement learning-based feature selection framework that identifies factors whose perturbations render positive and negative events indistinguishable, thereby discovering the regional underlying mechanisms of PFDF occurrence across regions. Our code and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/KINDLab-Fly/PFDF-Benchmark.

Accurate short-term load forecasting (STLF) is essential for the reliable and efficient operation of modern power systems. While time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of forecasting tasks, their effectiveness for STLF under realistic operational conditions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark of four trained-from-scratch (TFS) models and four TSFMs across three real-world load forecasting datasets under operational scenarios that differ in the availability and quality of future covariate information. Our results show that Chronos-2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings when future covariates are available or accurately forecast. However, its performance degrades as covariate forecasts become increasingly noisy, whereas TimesNet exhibits greater robustness under severe covariate uncertainty. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of covariate-informed TSFMs for STLF while highlighting the critical role of robust covariate modeling in real-world forecasting applications.

Despite the success of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) on broad benchmarks, their ability to internalize basic temporal logic, especially in settings supported by exogenous covariates, remains under-examined. We introduce SimpleTimeBench, a diagnostic univariate and multivariate "unit test" suite for primitives such as monotonic trends, periodic signals and leading indicator covariates, scenarios where near-perfect forecasts should be trivial. Surprisingly, prominent multivariate TSFMs (Chronos-2, Moirai and Toto) frequently produce suboptimal zero-shot forecasts for these inputs. While fine-tuning Chronos-2 improves its behaviour on specific tasks, we show that this adaptation degrades performance on other fundamental patterns rather than enhancing its generalizable foundational capabilities. This reveals a gap between pre-training scale and basic temporal reasoning, suggesting that current TSFMs could potentially lack the inductive biases needed to capture simple predictable functions. We further demonstrate that these failures are not merely synthetic curiosities: they persist in real-world sensor forecasting, where TSFMs consistently underutilize leading indicators available in observed covariates. This inability to capture simple relationships limits the practical utility and reliability of current multivariate models.

Outcome-based reinforcement learning can train language models to forecast real-world events, but prior forecasting work either freezes research context before training or deploys agentic research only at test time, so the skill of gathering evidence is never shaped by the reward. We introduce an agentic forecasting environment, dataset, and harness built from 2,100+ resolved Polymarket questions; the agent acquires its own context at rollout time (web search, page reading, and financial time series, all restricted by layered leak filtering to information published before each question's cutoff), and we train Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (3B active parameters) on it with single-epoch GRPO under a Brier-score reward. Training changes how the agent interacts with information: calibration improves 30-40%, and search attempts fall from 3.8 to 2.25 per rollout as evidence discipline is learned. Evaluated in an identical harness against four frontier models, the trained policy also finishes ahead of every frontier model tested at evidence-based forecasting, including Claude Opus 4.5 (soft-Brier 0.254 vs. 0.256, n=265), at about 5% of the inference cost, and its margin is widest on the hardest questions, the ones the crowd itself had not decided. We release the environment, dataset, and per-rollout records as a reusable harness for temporal forecasting agents.

A time series world model (TSWM) predicts a controlled system's state from its observed history and planned actions and exogenous inputs. Current approaches build forecasters with actions as covariates, trained and evaluated on prediction error under the executed plan. Yet world models compare unexecuted plans, but their responses to changed plans remain untested. We ask which design choices matter and whether accurate forecasters respond to changed plans as real systems do. We address both with a formalization and benchmark. The formalization separates state, actions and exogenous inputs, distinguishes continuous, mode and event actions, and introduces mechanism consistency, a metric built on declared action-state relations with known directions, such as a vasopressor raising blood pressure: it checks whether shifting an action moves the forecast in the declared direction. The benchmark consolidates eight public datasets with real actions from engineered infrastructure and clinical care, varying prediction space, plan fusion and plan encoding across seven backbones and five seeds. First, a frozen latent prediction space lowers MAE by 9.9% over observation space and gated output fusion lowers it by 12.7% over input concatenation on average, with both improving all eight datasets; temporal plan encoding changes average MAE by at most 2.2%. Second, prediction error and mechanism consistency diverge: the lowest-error configuration is at or below chance in consistency on four of five datasets with declared mechanisms, and no design choice avoids this. Finally, directional supervision, a loss penalizing the wrong-signed part of the response to a shifted action, significantly raises consistency on penalized mechanisms with no change in MAE. Together they give TSWMs a recipe: a frozen latent space and output-side fusion for accuracy, and a training objective for mechanism consistency.

Time-series forecasting models achieve strong benchmark performance but exhibit severe systematic bias in industrial deployments. This train--deploy gap is conventionally attributed to temporal-structural errors or distribution shifts. We characterize a complementary source that these explanations overlook: canonical losses embed fixed statistical priors, while industrial demand mixes benign and pathological regimes---zero-inflation, skewness, high variability---in which these priors are systematically violated. The induced bias persists even under perfect temporal modeling, remains in a distributional-shape component that normalization cannot remove, and creates an aggregation trade-off invisible to aggregate metrics. We turn these observations into an evaluation toolkit centered on the Regime-wise Relative Bias Vector (RBV): a metric-agnostic, regime-decomposed diagnostic that audits how pooled training allocates systematic mismatch across pathological subpopulations. A controlled attribution analysis decomposes RBV into a model-independent intrinsic floor, set by each loss's estimand, and an excess component attributable to training, tracing observed bias to the loss rather than the model. A large-scale study---13 loss objectives, 3 seeds, 60,000+ series spanning RetailShiftBench and M5, with random-split controls---shows that regime-aware diagnosis separates optimization-type from bias-type failure, and that regime-aware training resolves the pooling-induced bias that capacity scaling cannot, for mean-type losses. A formal structural observation, that risk under evaluation-distribution contamination is affine in the pathology mixture weight, grounds these findings. Our work complements model ranking with mechanism-grounded, regime-oriented evaluation.

Large forecasting applications often combine statistical, machine-learning, and neural models. These families solve the same problem but differ in fitted state, training procedures, and how they parallelize work. Forecasting software must therefore either hide these differences behind a single estimator interface, or keep the families in separate packages, forcing users to rewrite data preparation and evaluation for every package. We present the Nixtlaverse, an ecosystem of open-source Python libraries for time series forecasting, as a case study of a third design: all libraries share the same long-format panel data and keyed forecast outputs, while every model family keeps its own specialized implementation. We demonstrate this design through three use cases on the public M5 competition data. First, we evaluate statistical, machine-learning, and neural models, and an external engine from a separate ecosystem, in a single rolling-origin evaluation with per-series and hierarchy-weighted metrics. Second, we profile runtime and peak memory from 100 to 30,490 series and locate each family's bottleneck: statistical fitting scales approximately linearly in the number of series, feature construction dominates machine-learning memory, and neural training time is nearly independent of panel size under a fixed training budget. Third, we reconcile the forecasts of multiple engines, including the external one, over all 42,840 series of the M5 hierarchy, with sparse reconciliation where dense implementations exhausted memory. These use cases establish the costs, boundaries, and utility of shared data and output contracts. The Nixtlaverse has seen substantial public distribution, scholarly reuse, and adoption through other forecasting frameworks, and is released under permissive open-source licenses with public datasets, reproducible examples, and verifiable benchmark artifacts.

Pretrained time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are evaluated as forecasters of future values, yet for sparse series many decisions depend only on which future periods contain activity. Standard benchmarks do not assess this. On five sparse datasets, we rank positions within forecast windows that contain both events and zeros. The released point forecasts of 12 TSFMs improve chance-corrected average precision over training-free references by at most 0.031, and in chance-corrected AUC the median TSFM falls below them on every dataset. With event supervision, linear probes of six frozen backbones improve on their backbone's point forecast in 29 of 30 backbone--dataset pairs. Averaging the predicted quantiles instead of taking their median improves the ranking of most TSFMs that forecast the median, and on two datasets the strongest such outputs rival the probes. The probes' advantage over raw-context learners depends on the dataset, and under the same probe, pretrained features outperform randomly initialized ones for five of six backbones. For sparse-event ranking, released point forecasts thus add little over simple references, whereas lightweight event heads on frozen TSFMs rank events better than these forecasts, and the best of them exceed gradient-boosted trees trained on the raw context on three of the five datasets. More broadly, assessing pretrained forecasters on tasks beyond value forecasting requires reporting their outputs, supervised probes of their representations, and raw-context and randomized controls side by side, since each supports a different conclusion.

Station weather forecasting is fundamentally shaped by both complex spatial dependencies across stations and strong physical coupling among weather variables. However, existing studies often consider these relationships separately and use different datasets and experimental settings, hindering systematic assessment of their individual and joint contributions. In this paper, we introduce $M^2$Weather, a benchmark for joint multi-station and multi-variable weather forecasting. Through multi-criteria quality control and station stratification, we collect 2,809 high-quality stations with 5 physically coupled weather variables across three spatial scales: France, Europe, and Global. This multi-scale design lets us examine whether conclusions persist from national to global station networks. We also introduce unified training and evaluation protocols to enable fair comparison of different station-variable modeling paradigms. To further examine the benefits of modeling station-variable relationships, we design a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter. With a trained weather forecasting model, this adapter can introduce missing station or variable relationships without retraining the model. This enables fair and efficient investigation of station-variable relationships. Systematic evaluation of 16 representative models shows the benefits of jointly modeling station and variable relationships. Completing missing relationships further reduces MSE for all adapted models on all three datasets. Together, these results identify the complementary information across stations and variables as an important resource for improving station weather forecasting. Our code can be obtained at https://github.com/hnu-vis/M2-Weather.

Physical-field reconstruction and forecasting depend on both measurement density and spatial layout, yet evaluation under a single observation pattern does not characterize performance when that pattern changes. We introduce PDE-OBS, an integrated benchmarking platform spanning numerical data generation, model training, and inference and evaluation under varying observation conditions. It combines 560,000 fields and trajectories from seven partial differential equation families with configurable observation operators and seven adapted baseline methods for stationary reconstruction and short-horizon forecasting. Separating observation construction from physical records allows users to specify parameterized patterns and deterministic mixtures for training and testing while preserving prediction targets and data splits. The evaluation protocol uses references trained for each test pattern to compare models on identical test observations and targets, alongside equal-count groups for spatial-layout comparisons. On a 14,000-record subset, we evaluate 441 trained models under nine test patterns, yielding 3,969 evaluations. Mean cross-pattern error exceeds mean matched-pattern error in all 49 PDE-method pairs, and this finding persists in a configuration-matched subset of 117 models. Denser test observations do not consistently reduce error for a fixed model. Mixed-pattern training on five completed pairs reduces large single-pattern transfer errors, although destination-trained references usually remain more accurate. Together, the benchmark and findings support systematic evaluation of observation-pattern sensitivity and provide a reusable workflow for developing methods under changing measurement conditions. Code: https://github.com/ru1ch3n/PDE-OBS.

Despite recent progress in irregular time series forecasting, the field still lacks a unified benchmark for fair and comprehensive evaluation. Existing evaluations are often conducted on a limited set of datasets with inconsistent experimental protocols and predominantly error-based metrics, rendering it difficult to compare and assess methods fairly and comprehensively across diverse settings. To eliminate these limitations and accelerate progress, we propose BITS, a standardized, reproducible, and extensible benchmark for advancing research on irregular time series forecasting. BITS covers eleven datasets from nine domains with diverse irregularity characteristics, and it characterizes the datasets according to their missing rate, missing pattern complexity, sampling irregularity, and skewness. Further, it offers a unified pipeline for data preprocessing, model integration and evaluation, and reporting. It accommodates regular and irregular time series forecasting methods, including time series foundation models, under consistent settings, incorporating both error-based and non-error-based evaluation metrics. Findings include that method performance varies substantially across irregularity characteristics, with no single modeling strategy consistently dominating. We also find that using error-based or non-error-based metrics can yield different model rankings, highlighting the need for multi-dimensional evaluation. The code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BITS-8F2E/.

We introduce Forecast-Dojo, a replayable environment for benchmarking and training LLM forecasting agents. It combines resolved prediction-market questions with dated news, allowing agents to research an event and revisit their predictions at successive historical dates. The same tasks and tools support repeated evaluation, collection of training interactions, and feedback from recorded outcomes without waiting for new events to resolve. Forecast-Dojo contains 1,568 Polymarket events, split by time into training and evaluation periods, and 18.8M dated news articles. In an evaluation of 12 models, research tools lower Brier score for all 12. Forecasts also improve as events unfold, with the largest gains at steps where more newly dated evidence is recorded. Every model still trails historical market forecasts in both Brier score and accuracy. A belief notebook carried between dates lowers research cost but does not consistently improve forecast quality. Beyond evaluation, Forecast-Dojo provides interaction trajectories and outcome feedback for agent learning, with supervised fine-tuning as a proof of concept.

Intermittent time series are common in spare-parts demand and retail sales. Since the cost of forecast errors is typically asymmetric, decisions such as inventory control require the full predictive distribution rather than a point forecast. Many probabilistic forecasting methods have been proposed; their implementations, however, are scattered across different software frameworks, making it difficult to compare them systematically. We introduce fable$.$intermittent, an R package that implements several probabilistic forecasting methods for intermittent series within the fable framework. The package allows several models to be fitted and evaluated on a collection of time series through a single, simple forecasting pipeline. We also introduce TWEES, a new exponential smoothing model with a Tweedie predictive distribution. Fitting TWEES requires repeated evaluation of the computationally demanding Tweedie density. We also release the R package tweedieDistr, whose implementation of the Tweedie distribution is substantially faster than the existing one while preserving the same numerical accuracy. We evaluate the methods implemented in fable$.$intermittent on four datasets, also released in the package.

Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) provide forecasts for operational decisions, but accuracy alone does not determine their value. Evaluating agents that use these models requires measuring decision quality and forecast cost. FWBench evaluates this capability on 1,251 electricity and cycle-hire cases using fixed forecast tools and simulated capacity contracts. Agents select models, histories and horizons, then submit capacities to minimize a stated loss-cost objective. We evaluated two hosted and eight local configurations, including small language models, and tested local models with and without TSFMs. GPT-6 Astra bought inexpensive short-horizon forecasts selectively, using 2.5% of the budget, and outperformed fixed policies when the saved decisions were scored with three loss-cost weightings. FWBench enables reproducible evaluation of how language models select and use time-series forecasts to make decisions under cost constraints.

Traditional evaluation metrics provides numerical values but often lack comprehensibility, hindering effective differentiation of model performances. Our work addresses this challenge by introducing overlay_dx, a novel evaluation metric measuring the performance of time series prediction models. Overlay_dx is a visual metric that represents the percentage of predictions falling within a confidence interval around actual values. Additionally, once evaluation results are plotted, overlay_dx computes the area under the overlay curve, providing a quantitative measure of alignment between predicted and actual values across different thresholds and predictions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach offers a unified evaluation framework that combines both visual and numerical assessments, enabling improved model comparison and providing valuable insights for further research and optimization efforts in time series prediction.

Accurate, reliable, and deployable wind power forecasting is critical for power system dispatch, renewable energy integration, and electricity market operations. Progress in this field hinges on the ability to empirically and comprehensively benchmark forecasting methods. Yet existing benchmarks fall short of supporting systematic evaluation in four key aspects: 1) limited coverage of wind power scenarios across turbine scale, variable composition, and spatial structure; 2) incomplete coverage of forecasting model families; 3) evaluation metrics misaligned with wind power requirements; and 4) limited structure-aware diagnostics beyond individual temporal patterns. To address these limitations, we propose WPBench, a comprehensive, fair, and extensible benchmark for wind power forecasting. WPBench integrates 26 public datasets organized by turbine scale and variable composition, spanning single-turbine, multi-turbine, univariate, and multivariate settings. Under unified processing, training, and evaluation protocols, it benchmarks 19 representative models covering traditional methods, deep temporal models, spatio-temporal models, and foundation models. Beyond point-wise errors, WPBench assesses forecast-curve fidelity and computational efficiency, and delivers structure-aware diagnostics across temporal, variable-dependency, and spatial-dependency perspectives. Together, these capabilities enable systematic model comparison across diverse wind scenarios and provide a reusable platform for future research.

Average squared error cannot reveal whether forecasting performance degrades because the future becomes less predictable or because forecasts move farther from the conditional mean. We introduce paired, mechanism-controlled stress tests that decompose changes in expected squared error at each lead time into environmental risk and forecast-oracle distance, using an origin-conditioned predictive oracle unavailable to the evaluated models. Three end-to-end controls have known attribution. Specifically, the null, environmental-only, and information-gap controls verify that the pipeline assigns changes to the correct component. We then apply the benchmark to 24 deployable forecasters. Under frequent switching, 14 methods have higher realized MSE but lower oracle distance; under outlier-variance feedback, 19 have higher MSE but lower scale-standardized MSE. Short- and long-lead stress-response rankings have Spearman correlation 0.624, revealing substantial horizon-dependent reordering. We then study multivariate relation shifts. Across six models and three coupling severities, oracle distance accounts for only 0.7-3.9% of the decomposed expected-risk increase, and environmental-risk majority persists in an eight-channel system and a matched-difficulty audit of Ring, Block, and Hub relations. Finally, prespecified contrasts on independent data-generating process (DGP) realizations show that several visually compelling discovery profiles, including trend accumulation and the hypothesized switching reversal, do not replicate. The benchmark thus combines component-wise diagnosis with a held-out stability audit. It complements real-data out-of-distribution evaluation, which measures performance under realistic shifts when exact oracle attribution is unavailable.

Pedestrian-count forecasting supports pedestrian-oriented Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including crowd monitoring, pedestrian-traffic staffing and routing, and proactive risk mitigation during surges. Recent time-series foundation models (FMs) report strong zero-shot accuracy on heterogeneous forecasting benchmarks, but it remains unclear whether these gains transfer reliably to pedestrian sensing deployments. We benchmark seven univariate forecasting approaches spanning four paradigms: Seasonal Naive, gradient-boosted trees (LightGBM, CatBoost), deep learning models (N-HiTS, PatchTST), and two pretrained FMs (TimesFM, Chronos-2). Experiments cover two complementary regimes: (i) a five-day special event dataset SAIL2025 at 3-minute resolution with limited in-domain history; and (ii) Melbourne pedestrian sensors as a multi-year hourly dataset (2010--2017) with strong seasonality. We compare the MAE and RMSE results per sensor across datasets and multiple forecast horizons. Results show three consistent findings. First, with limited historical data, Seasonal Naive remains a strong baseline for long-horizon forecasting on high-volume sensors, while trained models can degrade when the next day differs substantially from prior days. Second, boosted trees can be competitive on lower-volume sensors but exhibit higher sensitivity on high-volume sensors under event-driven shift. Third, FMs excel in the seasonal and data-rich regime under long-context configuration. The findings highlight the importance of choosing pedestrian forecasting models based on both the underlying data conditions and the forecasting horizon.

Understanding and predicting wildlife movement is critical for ecology and conservation. While trajectory forecasting has advanced for human and vehicle movement, wildlife trajectories present distinct challenges: they are unconstrained in space, highly stochastic, and influenced by environmental conditions. We introduce MoveBench, the first large-scale benchmark for probabilistic wildlife movement forecasting, containing 2.6M GPS locations from 800+ individuals across 110 species in 127 countries, paired with 1.6B environmental raster tiles capturing 160 covariates known or hypothesized to influence movement. We propose a probabilistic evaluation protocol for movement trajectory forecasts, addressing limitations of point-prediction metrics for inherently stochastic phenomena. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation of four method families across multiple temporal and spatial scales, we reveal that: (1) existing predictive methods generalize better to future timepoints than to unseen individuals, (2) deep learning approaches do not consistently outperform simpler baselines, and (3) environmental covariate selection significantly impacts performance. MoveBench enables standardized evaluation of movement forecasting methods and provides a foundation for methodological advances on this ecologically important task.

Most time series forecasting benchmarks remain numerical-centric and provide limited support for evaluating contextual information that shapes real-world temporal dynamics. Existing multimodal benchmarks also suffer from limited data and context coverage, fragmented evaluation settings, and overreliance on aggregate evaluation. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MUSE-Bench}, a unified benchmark for multimodal time series forecasting with heterogeneous context. It comprises fourteen datasets across eight domains and six types of context: metadata, events, holidays, news, images, and numerical covariates. We evaluate diverse forecasting paradigms, including statistical, data-specific, foundation, multimodal, and general-purpose LLM forecasting methods under shared non-overlapping forecast windows, common target observations, and consistent point and probabilistic metrics. Extensive experiments yield three main findings. First, numerical time series foundation models dominate the overall ranking, while Aurora, the evaluated multimodal foundation model, trails the leading numerical TSFMs but outperforms all evaluated data-specific models. Second, ablations show that external context improves the four evaluated context-aware models, whereas incorrect or temporally misaligned context degrades performance. Third, general-purpose LLMs perform poorly as direct forecasters, and LLM-guided refinement does not yield consistent improvements. MUSE-Bench enables systematic evaluation of how forecasting models utilize context and provides a foundation for future multimodal forecasting research.

Multimodal forecasting models that combine time series with text annotations promise richer prediction through textual context, but how do we know whether a text annotation meaningfully contributes to the forecasters prediction? This is an information-theoretic question, but to evaluate whether information-theoretic metrics can reliably measure the predictive value an annotation provides, a ground truth benchmark is needed, and none currently exist. We create a synthetic time series signal with annotations in three categories: semantically correct, incorrect, and irrelevant. Because the data generation process is fully controlled, ground-truth information content is known exactly, enabling principled evaluation of six complementary mutual information estimators (KSG, MINE, InfoNCE, CCA, PID and V-information). We show that all six estimators identify correct annotations as most informative, and are able to audit the quality of mixed text corpora, choosing the annotations that result in the best downstream forecasting results without the need for model training. Our benchmark identifies limitations of each estimator, and these are validated on seven real-world datasets, which show how estimator performance differs on weak signals. Finally, we establish practical rules for implementing these metrics for annotation auditing and fusion selection.

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 remedy is a hold-out that postdates the models. We build one: thirteen forecasters -- four classical, three trained per dataset, six pretrained -- on seven groups drawn from five domains, every observation published after the last model was released, and every dataset rebuildable without an API key. Under this protocol pretrained models win 5 of 7 groups, lose one to a Theta baseline, and on daily exchange rates are indistinguishable from a seasonal naive forecast, along with every other method tested. We then ask what separates the wins from the losses, and report a negative result: the two intrinsic properties one would reach for -- seasonal strength and spectral entropy, measured on the input window -- do not account for the pattern, and seasonal strength is if anything negatively associated with the advantage. What does track it is corpus familiarity. Our largest gain (28% lower MASE than the best classical method, on weekly Wikipedia pageviews) falls on Wikipedia pageviews, the domain TimesFM's authors describe as the bulk of its pretraining corpus, at the same granularities and differing only in time window. Within the pretrained family, where every model forecasts identical series so that series difficulty cancels, the TimesFM family outranks the Chronos family by -0.53 ranks on Wikipedia against -0.09 everywhere else (1,500 vs. 754 series, Mann-Whitney p < 1e-5). We conclude that a temporal hold-out removes memorisation of a window but not familiarity with a domain, that benchmarks therefore need domain hold-outs stated relative to disclosed corpora, and that the practitioner's question is less which model is better than whether their domain is one the model was raised on.

Voice phishing (vishing) unfolds in real time; by the time a call has ended and post-hoc classification is possible, the harm has already been done. The more actionable question is which concrete harm (Information Gathering or Financial Exploitation) an ongoing call is tactically progressing toward. We present Vishing-Tactics-Bench, a benchmark grounded in Endsley's situation-awareness (SA) framework that recasts vishing defense from after-the-fact fraud classification to harm projection: predicting at each turn whether the call will reach either terminal harm. We adapt MITRE ATT&CK to vishing as a 6-tactic taxonomy (Vishing-Tactics) and label 35,340 scammer utterances across 5,645 synthetic Chinese calls. We define Exploitation Trajectory Forecasting, a survival-style protocol over the two terminal harms with three metrics: AP@k, C-index, and divergence error. Baselines ranging from a Markov heuristic to fine-tuned LLMs show that the tactical trajectory serves as an interpretable representation of the call's tactical state, supporting harm-specific forecasting, which can then be used for the downstream application of intervention selection; a stratified lead-time analysis at a tight false-alarm budget further identifies at what point in a call the trajectory signal yields early warning.

Large language models increasingly generate research ideas, yet judging their novelty or feasibility at generation time does not establish whether they anticipate subsequent work. We introduce IdeaForecastBench to evaluate research idea forecasting. Given a community's literature up to a cutoff, a system produces up to five ranked ideas, which are evaluated against later papers. The benchmark comprises 624 rolling episodes across 52 topics, with a fixed retrieve-then-judge protocol and separately reported results from two judges. We compare five history-compression strategies across GPT-4.1, Qwen2.5-7B/14B, and Qwen3.5-9B, together with a learned Mode-Decomposition Forecaster (MDF). Under the primary GPT-4.1-mini judge, Summary improves on Direct in Hit@5 and Precision@5 across all four backbones. Qwen2.5 scores above GPT-4.1, whereas Qwen3.5 scores below it. An outcome-blind assessment finds that Qwen2.5 produces broader forecasts, but does not identify how much breadth contributes to its advantage. Threshold and judge diagnostics further clarify the limits of interpreting realization as precise anticipation. IdeaForecastBench provides a common task for studying which research ideas a community subsequently pursues and how reliably this outcome can be measured.

Nowcasting headline macroeconomic indicators, i.e., estimating an indicator's value for the current reference period before its official release, is critical for monetary policy and financial markets, and central banks devote dedicated teams of expert economists to producing such estimates. Large language model (LLM) agents are a promising candidate for this task, combining broad world knowledge with real-time web search and supporting queries at higher frequency than institutional nowcasts. Evaluating their nowcasting capability is, however, challenging: headline indicators such as GDP and CPI are widely reported and likely memorized during pretraining, so any evaluation on historical releases is vulnerable to data contamination. To address this, we introduce LiveMacroEval, a live, contamination-resistant benchmark in which LLM agents produce hourly nowcasts for sixteen major U.S. macroeconomic indicators over a pre-release window closing at each official release. Nowcast quality is assessed through a LiveMacro Score against announcement-window equity returns and a LiveBetting Score from simulated Polymarket-style trading, with Federal Reserve regional-bank nowcasts, the Bloomberg ECOS professional consensus, and an auto-ARIMA baseline as comparators. Over six months with four state-of-the-art LLM agents configured with web search, aggregate nowcast accuracy is broadly comparable to the institutional and professional benchmarks, with performance varying widely across individual indicators. This highlights LLM agents' potential as real-time estimators of macroeconomic conditions.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are routinely employed for spatiotemporal forecasting, yet their performance across widely used benchmark datasets is inconsistent. Here, we perform an audit of dataset properties and baseline models to assess the quality of the benchmarks, and the robustness of the conclusions drawn from them. Using classical statistical tools, we characterise spatiotemporal lagged dependencies in benchmarks, and examine how temporal differencing changes these relationships and affects model rankings. Motivated by this, we re-evaluate temporal linear baselines, significantly reducing the apparent gains from GNNs on several benchmarks, and surpassing GNNs on others. Suspecting that GNNs struggle to extract linear, node-wise signals, we find that supplying them with autoregressive residuals improves their performance particularly on non-traffic benchmarks. Finally, controlled synthetic experiments reveal that GNNs are sensitive to heterogeneity in temporal dynamics and spatial graph interactions. Together, our findings demonstrate that baseline specification, data pre-processing and system heterogeneity shape the interpretations drawn from benchmark rankings, informing the design and robust evaluation of GNNs.

Specialist training beats generalist scale when forecasting financial statements. To our knowledge, no prior work jointly forecasts complete financial statements beyond one year, yet in a discounted-cash-flow valuation most firm value sits past that window. We release ProForma-20Q, a reproducible benchmark for forecasting 78 statement line items 1-20 quarters ahead, for anonymized firms, from past statements and an industry code, scored by change-space $R^2$. On it, Forma, a transformer that reads statements as sets of (account, quarter, value) tuples and maximizes a masked-tuple Gaussian likelihood, beats every competitor we field: classical machine learning, chained gradient boosting, a zero-shot time-series foundation model, and frontier large language models. Its lead widens with horizon, where valuation needs accuracy most, and its Gaussian predictive intervals never under-cover. Forma's forecasts nearly satisfy accounting identities; exact coherence is recoverable at no statistically significant accuracy cost. Its tuple interface supports scenario analysis without retraining, and we show that pinning future revenue paths sharpens the rest of the statement.