TEMPO: Temporal Enforcement via Mode-Separated Policy Optimization for Trustworthy LLM Backtesting
Backtesting large language models on historical events requires reasoning exclusively from information available before a specified cutoff date. Yet models routinely leak post-cutoff knowledge from pre-training into their reasoning, inflating apparent accuracy and undermining evaluation validity. Prompt-based constraints fail when suppressed content is causally related to the prediction, and knowledge unlearning cannot address this problem because temporal compliance is instance-specific: the same fact may be legitimate evidence for one cutoff date and a violation for another. Rather than erasing knowledge, the model must learn temporal discipline: selecting evidence conditioned on each i...
| Authors | Zeyu Zhang, Bradly C. Stadie |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 May 2026 |
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