Agentic Forecasting using Sequential Bayesian Updating of Linguistic Beliefs

arXiv:2604.18576v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present BLF (Bayesian Linguistic Forecaster), an agentic system for binary forecasting that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ForecastBench benchmark. The system is built on three ideas. (1) A linguistic belief state: a semi-structured representation combining numerical probability estimates with natural-language evidence summaries, updated by the LLM at each step of an iterative tool-use loop. This contrasts with the common approach