Papers › AutoCast++: Enhancing World Event Prediction with Zero-shot Ranking-based Context Retrieval

AutoCast++: Enhancing World Event Prediction with Zero-shot Ranking-based Context Retrieval

3 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.01880archive 2025-07-28

Qi Yan, Raihan Seraj, JiaWei He, Lili Meng, Tristan Sylvain

Machine-based prediction of real-world events is garnering attention due to its potential for informed decision-making. Whereas traditional forecasting predominantly hinges on structured data like time-series, recent breakthroughs in language models enable predictions using unstructured text. In particular, (Zou et al., 2022) unveils AutoCast, a new benchmark that employs news articles for answering forecasting queries. Nevertheless, existing methods still trail behind human performance. The cornerstone of accurate forecasting, we argue, lies in identifying a concise, yet rich subset of news snippets from a vast corpus. With this motivation, we introduce AutoCast++, a zero-shot ranking-based context retrieval system, tailored to sift through expansive news document collections for event forecasting. Our approach first re-ranks articles based on zero-shot question-passage relevance, honing in on semantically pertinent news. Following this, the chosen articles are subjected to zero-shot summarization to attain succinct context. Leveraging a pre-trained language model, we conduct both the relevance evaluation and article summarization without needing domain-specific training. Notably, recent articles can sometimes be at odds with preceding ones due to new facts or unanticipated incidents, leading to fluctuating temporal dynamics. To tackle this, our re-ranking mechanism gives preference to more recent articles, and we further regularize the multi-passage representation learning to align with human forecaster responses made on different dates. Empirical results underscore marked improvements across multiple metrics, improving the performance for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) by 48% and true/false (TF) questions by up to 8%. Code is available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2310.01880")

Code

Syntology Ran 1 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 2 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 3 samples from 1 repository, 1 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

3 samples harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-25; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran
2unverified

Licence: 3 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

EncoderWrapper BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus/autocast_experiments/src/model_multihead.py official repository ran licence not identified · pointer only · 4dc46159f8aa8a9a · report
FiDT5 BorealisAI/Autocast-plus-plus/autocast_experiments/src/model_multihead.py official repository unverified licence not identified · pointer only · e96f4476c6fb2e95 · report
load_json_data borealisai/autocast-plus-plus/autocast_experiments/data/process.py official repository unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 6fb1488fa816f0cc · report

Tasks

ArticlesDecision MakingLanguage ModellingMultiple-choiceRe-RankingRepresentation LearningRetrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ALIGN

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections