Zihang Zhou
Author directory2026
Agentic Time Machine as an Infrastructure for Future-Event Forecasting
Jingyi Chai | Bingyang Zheng | Xiangrui Liu | Hao Lu | Zihang Zhou | Tianchen Wang | Kemeng Zhang | Siheng Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingyi Chai | Bingyang Zheng | Xiangrui Liu | Hao Lu | Zihang Zhou | Tianchen Wang | Kemeng Zhang | Siheng Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Forecasting future events is a critical challenge for large language model (LLM) agents, spanning domains from elections and monetary policy to financial markets. However, evaluating progress on this task presents a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and environment fidelity. While live evaluation benchmarks suffer from an inherently slow feedback loop, existing retrospective replays typically restrict agents to static, pre-frozen databases that sacrifice the environmental realism of actual deployments. To tackle this issue, we introduce Agentic Time Machine (TM), an infrastructure that approximates the pre-cutoff web state at any chosen past time by filtering post-cutoff content. Leveraging this evaluation infrastructure, we further propose a planner-solver-aggregator multi-agent framework that breaks each question into diverse analytical angles, gathers evidence in parallel, and combines the results into a single forecast. Experiments show that offline scores under TM correlate strongly with live FutureX scores, validating that TM offers a fast and reliable sandbox for forecasting-agent evaluation. On FutureX-Past and Polymarket evaluated under TM, our framework achieves the highest score among strong closed-book, tool-augmented, and self-consistency baselines. On the live FutureX leaderboard, our system achieves the best average rank over four consecutive weeks, ranking 1st in May Week 1.