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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

FutureSim: Replaying World Events to Evaluate Adaptive Agents

Shashwat Goel, Nikhil Chandak, Arvindh Arun, Ameya Prabhu, Steffen Staab, Moritz Hardt, Maksym Andriushchenko, Jonas Geiping

Abstract

AI agents are being increasingly deployed in dynamic, open-ended environments that require adapting to new information as it arrives. To efficiently measure this capability for realistic use-cases, we propose building grounded simulations that replay real-world events in the order they occurred. We build FutureSim, where agents forecast world events beyond their knowledge cutoff while interacting with a chronological replay of the world: real news articles arriving and questions resolving over the simulated period. We evaluate frontier agents in their native harness, testing their ability to predict world events over a three-month period from January to March 2026. FutureSim reveals a clear separation in their capabilities, with the best agent's accuracy being 25%, and many having worse calibration than a constant predictor. Through careful ablations, we show how FutureSim offers a realistic setting to study emerging research directions like long-horizon test-time adaptation, search, memory and reasoning about uncertainty. Overall, we hope our benchmark design paves the way to measure AI progress on long-horizon open-ended adaptation spanning multiple months in the real world.

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