Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Xiaoming Shi, Siqiao Xue, Kangrui Wang, Fan Zhou, James Zhang, Jun Zhou, Chenhao Tan, Hongyuan Mei
Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in event prediction. Particularly, the language model performs abductive reasoning to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes; a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on several challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework---thanks to the reasoning capabilities of large language models---could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.