ServiceNow Research

Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information

Abstract

Forecasting is a critical task in decision-making across numerous domains. While historical numerical data provide a start, they fail to convey the complete context for reliable and accurate predictions. Human forecasters frequently rely on additional information, such as background knowledge and constraints, which can efficiently be communicated through natural language. However, in spite of recent progress with LLM-based forecasters, their ability to effectively integrate this textual information remains an open question. To address this, we introduce “Context is Key” (CiK), a time-series forecasting benchmark that pairs numerical data with diverse types of carefully crafted textual context, requiring models to integrate both modalities; crucially, every task in CiK requires understanding textual context to be solved successfully. We evaluate a range of approaches, including statistical models, time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasters, and propose a simple yet effective LLM prompting method that outperforms all other tested methods on our benchmark. Our experiments highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information, demonstrate surprising performance when using LLM-based forecasting models, and also reveal some of their critical shortcomings. This benchmark aims to advance multimodal forecasting by promoting models that are both accurate and accessible to decision-makers with varied technical expertise. The benchmark can be visualized at https://anon-forecast.github.io/benchmark_report_dev/.

Publication
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Arjun Ashok
Arjun Ashok
Visiting Researcher

Visiting Researcher at AI Frontier Research located at Montreal, QC, Canada.

Étienne Marcotte
Étienne Marcotte
Applied Research Scientist

Applied Research Scientist at AI Frontier Research located at Montreal, QC, Canada.

Valentina Zantedeschi
Valentina Zantedeschi
Research Scientist

Research Scientist at AI Frontier Research located at Montreal, QC, Canada.

Alexandre Lacoste
Alexandre Lacoste
Research Lead

Research Lead at AI Frontier Research located at Montreal, QC, Canada.

Nicolas Chapados
Nicolas Chapados
VP of Research

VP of Research at AI Research Management located at Montreal, QC, Canada.

Alexandre Drouin
Alexandre Drouin
Head of AI Frontier Research​

Head of AI Frontier Research​ at AI Frontier Research located at Montreal, QC, Canada.