# From Narrative to Auditable Forecasts: A Structured Scaffold for Agentic Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05905/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11763/) (2025)
- [ForecastBench: A Dynamic Benchmark of AI Forecasting Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19839/) (2024)
- [Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18563/) (2024)
- [From News to Forecast: Integrating Event Analysis in LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting with Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17515/) (2024)
- [Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd: LLM Ensemble Prediction Capabilities Rival Human Crowd Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19379/) (2024)
- [FutureX: An Advanced Live Benchmark for LLM Agents in Future Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11987/) (2025)
- [LLM-as-a-Prophet: Understanding Predictive Intelligence with Prophet Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17638/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model Prediction Capabilities: Evidence from a Real-World Forecasting Tournament](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13014/) (2023)
- [Outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to Predict the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17989/) (2025)
- [Scaling Open-Ended Reasoning to Predict the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.25070/) (2025)
- [LLMs Can Teach Themselves to Better Predict the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05253/) (2025)
- [Prompt Engineering Large Language Models' Forecasting Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01578/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM agents are increasingly used for live forecasting, where they retrieve up-to-date information and produce estimates for unresolved future events. However, current agentic forecasting often relies on implicit narrative aggregation: agents collect evidence, discuss it in prose, and often assign a probability without an explicit update path from evidence to forecast. This limits both forecasting accuracy and auditability. We propose AuditForecast, an agentic scaffold for structured probabilistic forecasting. AuditForecast first anchors the forecast with a suitable quantitative baseline model, uses model-guided data retrieval to derive a base probability, and then applies situational factor updates outside the model's scope through mechanical aggregation in odds space. This turns forecasting from a prose-based judgment into a structured process with explicit intermediate objects. Across multiple live forecasting benchmarks, AuditForecast improves forecasting accuracy and calibration relative to strong agentic baselines, surpasses market-implied references in several settings, and outperforms substantially more expensive deep-research agents while remaining Pareto-dominant in the cost--accuracy tradeoff. Beyond performance gains, AuditForecast produces an auditable forecasting report that makes forecast construction explicit and supports systematic post hoc analysis.