Study compares scored and generated readouts in language models fine-tuned on customer behavior

A new arXiv study investigates whether two common ways of extracting predictions from language models trained on customer behavior data — directly scoring answer probabilities versus having the model generate free-text responses — yield equivalent results. The researchers hold the model checkpoint and prompt content fixed while varying only the elicitation format, allowing a controlled comparison of outcome probabilities across both approaches. The work addresses how interchangeable these readout styles really are in applied predictive settings.