Approximate Recall, Approximate Forecasts: Recall as a Diagnostic for LLM Forecasting Errors

Prashanth Bhaskara, Shubhaankar Gupta, Seojoon Yeon

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit approximate recall: they retain coarse associations about past events while losing fidelity on specific details. Past research on LLMs has quantified different models' forecasting ability in real-world events using prediction markets, but has not studied how losing said fidelity impacts their forecasting abilities. For example: while an LLM correctly recalls that the answer to: ''Did Anna Sawai win the Best Drama Actress in the 76th Emmy Awards?'' is ''Yes,'' it incorrectly states the event date as September 22 rather than September 15. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric called the Recall Fidelity Score to study how imprecision in internalized knowledge propagates to forecasting capability on future events. On resolved historical markets, we find that higher local recall fidelity around semantically similar past events predicts lower forecasting error on resolved markets, and the same signal predicts smaller distance from open markets prices.