# Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11445/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11717/) (2024)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03827/) (2022)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [Reasoning Models Don't Always Say What They Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05410/) (2025)
- [Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11926/) (2025)
- [On the Robustness of Interpretability Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08049/) (2018)
- [Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05867/) (2020)
- [Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15927/) (2024)
- [Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11473/) (2025)
- [Explainable Machine Learning in Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06342/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Reasoning In The Wild Is Not Always Faithful](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08679/) (2025)
- [Formalizing Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Prerequisites, Causes and Goals of Human Trust in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07487/) (2020)
- [FEVEROUS: Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05707/) (2021)
- [Reasoning Models Know When They're Right: Probing Hidden States for Self-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05419/) (2025)
- [Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07071/) (2024)
- [Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19143/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.