[Submitted on 9 Jul 2026]
Title:When Should Forecasting Agents Reason? Behavioral Stress Tests for Reliability Routing
View a PDF of the paper titled When Should Forecasting Agents Reason? Behavioral Stress Tests for Reliability Routing, by Yufeng Wang
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Forecasting agents increasingly combine language-model reasoning, retrieval, ensembling, and calibration, but it remains unclear when each behavior should be trusted. We study this question on ForecastBench-style binary forecasting tasks, treating the choice to retrieve, reason, defer to a market prior, or use a historical analog as an observable agent behavior rather than a hidden implementation detail. Our central finding is that mechanism choice is source-dependent: structured analogs dominate for some data-generating processes, while market/crowd-style and conservative baselines are better for others. We introduce ReliabilityRoute, a structural intervention that steers forecasting-agent behavior using reliability features such as historical coverage, market-prior availability, source-prior sharpness, evidence strength, evidence disagreement, and horizon. A fixed 2024-fitted rule closely matches a hand taxonomy without hard-coded source-name decisions, while a walk-forward self-adjusting rule refits thresholds from previously resolved vintages and obtains the best mean Brier score among our deterministic systems across 16 later LLM vintages. The gain is modest and historical/search baselines remain highly competitive. The main contribution is therefore a behavioral stress test showing that more reasoning is not always better; forecasting agents should first estimate which evidence source deserves control, routing policies should themselves adapt under auditable constraints, and reproducibility artifacts are available at this https URL
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.28475 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.28475v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28475
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yufeng Wang [view email] [v1] Thu, 9 Jul 2026 02:41:49 UTC (40 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled When Should Forecasting Agents Reason? Behavioral Stress Tests for Reliability Routing, by Yufeng Wang
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.AI
new | recent | 2026-09
Change to browse by:
cs cs.CL
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)