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DatedGPT: Preventing Lookahead Bias in Large Language Models with Time-Aware Pretraining

Yutong Yan, Raphael Tang, Zhenyu Gao, Wenxi Jiang, Yao Lu · Mar 12, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics
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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training. To address this, we present DatedGPT, a family of twelve 1.3B-parameter language models, each trained from scratch on approximately 100 billion tokens of temporally partitioned data with strict annual cutoffs spanning 2013 to 2024. We further enhance each model with instruction fine-tuning on both general-domain and finance-specific datasets curated to respect the same temporal boundaries. Perplexity-based probing confirms that each model's knowledge is effectively bounded by its data cutoff year, while evaluation on standard benchmarks shows competitive performance with existing models of similar scale. We provide an interactive web demo that allows users to query and compare responses from models across different cutoff years.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training."

Reported Metrics

partial

Perplexity

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Perplexity-based probing confirms that each model's knowledge is effectively bounded by its data cutoff year, while evaluation on standard benchmarks shows competitive performance with existing models of similar scale."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

perplexity

Research Brief

Metadata summary

In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • In financial backtesting, large language models pretrained on internet-scale data risk introducing lookahead bias that undermines their forecasting validity, as they may have already seen the true outcome during training.
  • To address this, we present DatedGPT, a family of twelve 1.3B-parameter language models, each trained from scratch on approximately 100 billion tokens of temporally partitioned data with strict annual cutoffs spanning 2013 to 2024.
  • We further enhance each model with instruction fine-tuning on both general-domain and finance-specific datasets curated to respect the same temporal boundaries.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • To address this, we present DatedGPT, a family of twelve 1.3B-parameter language models, each trained from scratch on approximately 100 billion tokens of temporally partitioned data with strict annual cutoffs spanning 2013 to 2024.
  • Perplexity-based probing confirms that each model's knowledge is effectively bounded by its data cutoff year, while evaluation on standard benchmarks shows competitive performance with existing models of similar scale.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Perplexity-based probing confirms that each model's knowledge is effectively bounded by its data cutoff year, while evaluation on standard benchmarks shows competitive performance with existing models of similar scale.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: perplexity

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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