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arXiv · 2604.04220

TimeSeek: Temporal Reliability of Agentic Forecasters

Hamza Mostafa·Om Shastri·Dennis Lee
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Abstract

We introduce TimeSeek, a benchmark for studying how the reliability of agentic LLM forecasters changes over a prediction market's lifecycle. We evaluate 10 frontier models on 150 CFTC-regulated Kalshi binary markets at five temporal checkpoints, with and without web search, for 15,000 forecasts total. Models are most competitive early in a market's life and on high-uncertainty markets, but much less competitive near resolution and on strong-consensus markets. Web search improves pooled Brier Skill Score (BSS) for every model overall, yet hurts in 12% of model-checkpoint pairs, indicating that retrieval is helpful on average but not uniformly so. Simple two-model ensembles reduce error without surpassing the market overall. These descriptive results motivate time-aware evaluation and selective-deference policies rather than a single market snapshot or a uniform tool-use setting.

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Hamza Mostafa, Om Shastri, Dennis Lee. 2026-04-05. TimeSeek: Temporal Reliability of Agentic Forecasters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04220

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