Sound decision-making relies on accurate prediction for tangible outcomes ranging from military conflict to disease outbreaks. To improve crowdsourced forecasting accuracy, we developed SAGE, a hybrid forecasting system that combines human and machine generated forecasts. The system provides a platform where users can interact with machine models and thus anchor their judgments on an objective benchmark. The system also aggregates human and machine forecasts weighting both for propinquity and based on assessed skill while adjusting for overconfidence. We present results from the Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC) - larger than comparable forecasting tournaments - including 1085 users forecasting 398 real-world forecasting problems over eight months. Our main result is that the hybrid system generated more accurate forecasts compared to a human-only baseline which had no machine generated predictions. We found that skilled forecasters who had access to machine-generated forecasts outperformed those who only viewed historical data. We also demonstrated the inclusion of machine-generated forecasts in our aggregation algorithms improved performance, both in terms of accuracy and scalability. This suggests that hybrid forecasting systems, which potentially require fewer human resources, can be a viable approach for maintaining a competitive level of accuracy over a larger number of forecasting questions.

Humans perceive and comprehend different visual properties of an object based on specific contexts. For instance, we know that a banana turns brown ``when it becomes rotten,'' whereas it appears green ``when it is unripe.'' Previous studies on probing visual commonsense knowledge have primarily focused on examining language models' understanding of typical properties (e.g., colors and shapes) of objects. We present WinoViz, a text-only evaluation dataset, consisting of 1,380 examples that probe the reasoning abilities of language models regarding variant visual properties of objects under different contexts or states. Our task is challenging since it requires pragmatic reasoning (finding intended meanings) and visual knowledge reasoning. We also present multi-hop data, a more challenging version of our data, which requires multi-step reasoning chains to solve our task. In our experimental analysis, our findings are: a) Large language models such as GPT-4 demonstrate effective performance, but when it comes to multi-hop data, their performance is significantly degraded. b) Large models perform well on pragmatic reasoning, but visual knowledge reasoning is a bottleneck in our task. c) Vision-language models outperform their language-model counterparts. d) A model with machine-generated images performs poorly in our task. This is due to the poor quality of the generated images.

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting benchmarks challenge models to predict future facts using knowledge of past facts. In this paper, we apply large language models (LLMs) to these benchmarks using in-context learning (ICL). We investigate whether and to what extent LLMs can be used for TKG forecasting, especially without any fine-tuning or explicit modules for capturing structural and temporal information. For our experiments, we present a framework that converts relevant historical facts into prompts and generates ranked predictions using token probabilities. Surprisingly, we observe that LLMs, out-of-the-box, perform on par with state-of-the-art TKG models carefully designed and trained for TKG forecasting. Our extensive evaluation presents performances across several models and datasets with different characteristics, compares alternative heuristics for preparing contextual information, and contrasts to prominent TKG methods and simple frequency and recency baselines. We also discover that using numerical indices instead of entity/relation names, i.e., hiding semantic information, does not significantly affect the performance ($\pm$0.4\% Hit@1). This shows that prior semantic knowledge is unnecessary; instead, LLMs can leverage the existing patterns in the context to achieve such performance. Our analysis also reveals that ICL enables LLMs to learn irregular patterns from the historical context, going beyond simple predictions based on common or recent information.

Generalization to unseen tasks is an important ability for few-shot learners to achieve better zero-/few-shot performance on diverse tasks. However, such generalization to vision-language tasks including grounding and generation tasks has been under-explored; existing few-shot VL models struggle to handle tasks that involve object grounding and multiple images such as visual commonsense reasoning or NLVR2. In this paper, we introduce GRILL, GRounded vIsion Language aLigning, a novel VL model that can be generalized to diverse tasks including visual question answering, captioning, and grounding tasks with no or very few training instances. Specifically, GRILL learns object grounding and localization by exploiting object-text alignments, which enables it to transfer to grounding tasks in a zero-/few-shot fashion. We evaluate our model on various zero-/few-shot VL tasks and show that it consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art few-shot methods.

Event forecasting is a challenging, yet consequential task, as humans seek to constantly plan for the future. Existing automated forecasting approaches rely mostly on structured data, such as time-series or event-based knowledge graphs, to help predict future events. In this work, we formulate the forecasting problem as a restricted-domain, multiple-choice, question-answering (QA) task that simulates the forecasting scenario. To showcase the usefulness of this task formulation, we introduce a dataset ForecastQA, a question-answering dataset consisting of 10,392 event forecasting questions, which have been collected and verified via crowdsourcing efforts. We also present our experiments on ForecastQA using BERT-based models and find that our best model achieves 61.0\% accuracy on the dataset, which is still far behind human performance by about 18%. We hope ForecastQA will support future research efforts in bridging this gap.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interests in interpretable graph reasoning methods. However, these models often suffer from limited performance when working on sparse and incomplete graphs, due to the lack of evidential paths that can reach target entities. Here we study open knowledge graph reasoning---a task that aims to reason for missing facts over a graph augmented by a background text corpus. A key challenge of the task is to filter out "irrelevant" facts extracted from corpus, in order to maintain an effective search space during path inference. We propose a novel reinforcement learning framework to train two collaborative agents jointly, i.e., a multi-hop graph reasoner and a fact extractor. The fact extraction agent generates fact triples from corpora to enrich the graph on the fly; while the reasoning agent provides feedback to the fact extractor and guides it towards promoting facts that are helpful for the interpretable reasoning. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Source code and datasets used in this paper can be downloaded at https://github.com/shanzhenren/CPL

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in learning representation of graph-structured data that are dynamically evolving. However, current dynamic graph learning methods lack a principled way in modeling temporal, multi-relational, and concurrent interactions between nodes---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of temporal knowledge graph reasoning, where the goal is to predict unseen entity relationships (i.e., events) over time. Here we present Recurrent Event Network (\method)---an architecture for modeling complex event sequences---which consists of a recurrent event encoder and a neighborhood aggregator. The event encoder employs a RNN to capture (subject, relation)-specific patterns from historical entity interactions; while the neighborhood aggregator summarizes concurrent interactions within each time stamp. An output layer is designed for predicting forthcoming, multi-relational events. Experiments on temporal link prediction over two knowledge graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially on multi-step inference over time.