Future-as-Label: Scalable Supervision from Real-World Outcomes
Abstract
Time creates free supervision: forecasts about real-world events resolve to verifiable outcomes. The passage of time provides labels that require no annotation. To exploit this structure, we extend reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to real-world prediction over time. We train language models to make probabilistic forecasts from causally masked information, using proper scoring rules as the reward function once events resolve. Learning is driven entirely by realized outcomes, enabling scalable outcome-based supervision in open-world prediction. On real-world forecasting benchmarks, Qwen3-32B trained using Foresight Learning improves Brier score by 27% and halves calibration error relative to its pretrained baseline, and outperforms Qwen3-235B on both constructed future-event prediction tasks and the Metaculus benchmark despite a 7x parameter disadvantage.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Forecasting Techniques and Applications
Topic Modeling
Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Publication details
- Journal / source
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Publication date
- 9 January 2026
- Document type
- Preprint