PROPHET: An Inferable Future Forecasting Benchmark with Causal Intervened Likelihood Estimation

Predicting future events stands as one of the ultimate aspirations of artificial intelligence. Recent advances in large language model (LLM)-based systems have shown remarkable potential in forecasting future events, thereby garnering significant interest in the research community. Currently, several benchmarks have been established to evaluate the forecasting capabilities by formalizing the event prediction as a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning task. In these benchmarks, each prediction question is answered with relevant retrieved news articles. However, because there is no consideration on whether the questions can be supported by valid or sufficient supporting rationales, some of the questions in these benchmarks may be inherently noninferable. To address this issue, we introduce a new benchmark, PROPHET, which comprises inferable forecasting questions paired with relevant news for retrieval. To ensure the inferability of the benchmark, we propose Causal Intervened Likelihood (CIL), a statistical measure that assesses inferability through causal inference. In constructing this benchmark, we first collected recent trend forecasting questions and then filtered the data using CIL, resulting in an inferable benchmark for event prediction. Through extensive experiments, we first demonstrate the validity of CIL and in-depth investigations into event prediction with the aid of CIL. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative prediction systems on PROPHET, drawing valuable insights for future directions.

A Coarse-to-fine Morphological Approach With Knowledge-based Rules and Self-adapting Correction for Lung Nodules Segmentation

The segmentation module which precisely outlines the nodules is a crucial step in a computer-aided diagnosis(CAD) system. The most challenging part of such a module is how to achieve high accuracy of the segmentation, especially for the juxtapleural, non-solid and small nodules. In this research, we present a coarse-to-fine methodology that greatly improves the thresholding method performance with a novel self-adapting correction algorithm and effectively removes noisy pixels with well-defined knowledge-based principles. Compared with recent strong morphological baselines, our algorithm, by combining dataset features, achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the public LIDC-IDRI dataset (DSC 0.699) and our private LC015 dataset (DSC 0.760) which closely approaches the SOTA deep learning-based models' performances. Furthermore, unlike most available morphological methods that can only segment the isolated and well-circumscribed nodules accurately, the precision of our method is totally independent of the nodule type or diameter, proving its applicability and generality.