CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to Predict the Future

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has boosted math and coding in large language models, yet there has been little effort to extend RLVR into messier, real-world domains like forecasting. One sticking point is that outcome-based reinforcement learning for forecasting must learn from binary, delayed, and noisy rewards, a regime where standard fine-tuning is brittle. We show that outcome-only online RL on a 14B model can match frontier-scale accuracy and surpass it in calibration and hypothetical prediction market betting by adapting two leading algorithms, Group-Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) and ReMax, to the forecasting setting. Our adaptations remove per-question variance scaling in GRPO, apply baseline-subtracted advantages in ReMax, hydrate training with 100k temporally consistent synthetic questions, and introduce lightweight guard-rails that penalise gibberish, non-English responses and missing rationales, enabling a single stable pass over 110k events. Scaling ReMax to 110k questions and ensembling seven predictions yields a 14B model that matches frontier baseline o1 on accuracy on our holdout set (Brier = 0.193, p = 0.23) while beating it in calibration (ECE = 0.042, p < 0.001). A simple trading rule turns this calibration edge into $127 of hypothetical profit versus $92 for o1 (p = 0.037). This demonstrates that refined RLVR methods can convert small-scale LLMs into potentially economically valuable forecasting tools, with implications for scaling this to larger models.

Read in full here:

Where Next?

Popular Ai topics Top

First poster: bot
The new suite is composed of four products that cover endpoint protection, endpoint detection and response, mobile threat defense, and us...
New
New
First poster: CommunityNews
Artificial intelligence and machine learning exist on the back of a lot of hard work from humans. Alongside the scientists, there are th...
#ai
New
First poster: CommunityNews
The use of facial recognition for surveillance, or algorithms that manipulate human behaviour, will be banned under proposed EU regulatio...
New
First poster: bot
When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume ...
New
New
First poster: ozornin
They are among 400 artists appealing to Sir Keir Starmer, saying creative industries are threatened.
New
First poster: gflashner
Google’s openly available Gemma collection of AI models has reached a milestone: over 150 million downloads. Omar Sanseviero, a developer...
New
First poster: mercyf
Google’s Veo 3 delivers AI videos of realistic people with sound and music. We put it to the test.
New
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1063 24245 395
New
AstonJ
If it’s a mechanical keyboard, which switches do you have? Would you recommend it? Why? What will your next keyboard be? Pics always w...
New
AstonJ
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Leverage your existing Rails codebase to build iOS and Android apps with Hotwire Native – no Swift or Kotlin experience necessary. J...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
An illustrated guide to understanding and effectively using regular expressions. Staffan Nöteberg To effectively use regular expressi...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
As digital systems increasingly run the world, mastery of the recurring patterns of software development risk is the key to fast and effe...
New