Conference Agenda
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 15th Sept 2026, 08:43:56am CEST
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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AP 05: Text Data and LLMs in Finance Location: LR M2.1 (Floor 2) Session Chair: Lieven Baele, Tilburg University | |
| Presentation 2 | |
ID: 2128
The Memorization Problem: Can We Trust LLMs' Economic Forecasts? University of Florida, United States of America Large language models (LLMs) cannot be trusted for economic forecasts during periods covered by their training data. Under black-box access, counterfactual forecasting ability is non-identified when the model has seen the realized values: any observed output is consistent with both genuine skill and memorization. Any evidence of memorization represents only a lower bound on encoded knowledge. We demonstrate LLMs have memorized economic and financial data, recalling exact values before their knowledge cutoff. Instructions to respect historical boundaries fail to prevent recall-level accuracy, and masking fails as LLMs reconstruct entities and dates from minimal context. Post-cutoff, we observe no recall. Memorization extends to embeddings.
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