prediction problem
How Well Do LLMs Predict Human Behavior? A Measure of their Pretrained Knowledge
Gao, Wayne, Han, Sukjin, Liang, Annie
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in economics as predictive tools--both to generate synthetic responses in place of human subjects (Horton, 2023; Anthis et al., 2025), and to forecast economic outcomes directly (Hewitt et al., 2024a; Faria-e Castro and Leibovici, 2024; Chan-Lau et al., 2025). Their appeal in these roles is obvious: A pretrained LLM embeds a vast amount of information and can be deployed at negligible cost, often in settings where collecting new, domain-specific human data would be expensive or infeasible. What remains unclear is how to assess the quality of these predictions. This paper proposes a measure that quantifies the domain-specific value of LLMs in an interpretable unit: the amount of human data they substitute for. Specifically, we ask how much human data would be required for a conventional model trained on that data to match the predictive performance of the pretrained LLM in that domain.
Noether Networks: meta-learning useful conserved quantities
Progress in machine learning (ML) stems from a combination of data availability, computational resources, and an appropriate encoding of inductive biases. Useful biases often exploit symmetries in the prediction problem, such as convolutional networks relying on translation equivariance. Automatically discovering these useful symmetries holds the potential to greatly improve the performance of ML systems, but still remains a challenge. In this work, we focus on sequential prediction problems and take inspiration from Noether's theorem to reduce the problem of finding inductive biases to meta-learning useful conserved quantities. We propose Noether Networks: a new type of architecture where a meta-learned conservation loss is optimized inside the prediction function. We show, theoretically and experimentally, that Noether Networks improve prediction quality, providing a general framework for discovering inductive biases in sequential problems.