让模型学会判断促销信息是否影响销量,只在必要时调整预测。
ReasonCast: Agentic Demand Forecasting with Selective Semantic Reasoning

- 用结构化字段表示促销等事件的影响,精准控制修改方向
- 在敏感品类上降低3.29%的预测误差,稳定期不乱改保持准确
- 适合需要结合文本与历史数据做销售预测的电商场景
需求预测需融合历史销售数据与未来促销、节假日、价格变动等前瞻性信息。现有方法常将上下文编码为通用向量并统一融合,未能明确区分哪些语义信息对预测有用,以及如何影响未来趋势。本文提出ReasonCast,一种结构化语义干预框架,将事件知识转化为特定预测操作。智能代理评估事件上下文、无文本预测及不确定性,决定是否启用推理。不使用自由文本,而是通过结构化字段(相关性、需求方向、时间形状、幅度、峰值强度)与时间序列模型交互。加性路径修正局部趋势与形态,乘性路径捕捉水平突变。引入基于预测结果的后训练流程:模式微调建立语义字段;语义场强化学习校准方向、形状、幅度与峰值判断;预测效用强化学习通过冻结的预测器评估干预效果,使推理输出与边际改进对齐。在节日敏感品类、大促敏感品类和M5事件窗口中,WMAPE分别降低3.29、1.25和0.47个百分点;而在稳定销售期,若盲目干预则会使WMAPE上升1.68个百分点,抑制无效干预可保留数值基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Demand forecasting increasingly requires combining two complementary sources of information: historical sales reveal recurring numerical dynamics, while future promotions, holidays, price changes, and platform interventions provide forward-looking knowledge. Existing text-enhanced forecasting methods often encode such context into generic representations and fuse it uniformly with time-series features, without explicitly distinguishing which semantic effects are forecast-relevant or how they should modify future dynamics. We introduce ReasonCast, a structured semantic intervention framework that translates event knowledge into forecast-specific operations. An agent examines the event context, the no-text forecast, and its uncertainty to determine whether textual reasoning is needed. Rather than injecting free-form text, ReasonCast represents event knowledge through structured fields describing event relevance, demand direction, temporal shape, amplitude, and peak intensity. These fields interact selectively with temporal components of a time-series foundation model. An additive path corrects local trends and temporal shapes, while a multiplicative path captures event-driven level shifts. ReasonCast introduces a forecast-grounded post-training curriculum. Schema SFT establishes semantic fields; semantic-field RL calibrates direction, shape, amplitude, and peak judgments; and forecast-utility RL evaluates semantic interventions through a frozen forecaster, aligning reasoning outputs with marginal forecast improvement. ReasonCast lowers WMAPE by 3.29, 1.25, and 0.47 percentage points on holiday-sensitive categories, mega-sale-sensitive categories, and M5 event windows, respectively. On stable-sales periods, indiscriminate semantic intervention increases WMAPE by 1.68 percentage points, whereas suppressing unnecessary intervention preserves the numerical backbone.
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