TFRBench: A Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Forecasting Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 7 Apr 2026] TFRBench: A Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Forecasting Systems Md Atik Ahamed, Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Yiwen Song, Long T. Le, Qiang Cheng, Chun-Liang Li, Hamid Palangi, Jinsung Yoon, Tomas Pfister We introduce TFRBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of forecasting systems. Traditionally, time-series forecasting has been evaluated solely on numerical accuracy, treating foundation models as ``black boxes.'' Unlike existing benchmarks, TFRBench provides a protocol for evaluating the reasoning generated by forecasting systems--specifically their analysis of cross-channel dependencies, trends, and external events. To enable this, we propose a systematic multi-agent framework that utilizes an iterative verification loop to synthesize numerically grounded reasoning traces. Spanning ten datasets across five domains, our evaluation confirms that this reasoning is causally effective; useful for evaluation; and prompting LLMs with our generated traces significantly improves forecasting accuracy compared to direct numerical prediction (e.g., avg. \sim40.2\%\to56.6\%), validating the quality of our reasoning. Conversely, benchmarking experiments reveal that off-the-shelf LLMs consistently struggle with both reasoning (lower LLM-as-a-Judge scores) and numerical forecasting, frequently failing to capture domain-specific dynamics. TFRBench thus establishes a new standard for interpretable, reasoning-based evaluation in time-series forecasting. Our benchmark is available at: this https URL Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.05364 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.05364v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.05364 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Md Atik Ahamed [view email] [v1] Tue, 7 Apr 2026 03:04:45 UTC (10,381 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark 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 Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)