Auditing and Fixing Economic Validity in Tabular Foundation Models for Discrete Choice

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26559v1
• Date: Tue, 26 May 2026 05:13:20 GMT
• Title: Auditing and Fixing Economic Validity in Tabular Foundation Models for Discrete Choice
• Abstract summary: Tabular foundation models achieve strong accuracy on choice prediction tasks.<n>But their predictions often violate the economic logic those tasks require.<n>We propose a two-stage adapter that embeds foundation model predictions within a utility-maximization framework.
• Score: 12.709654635425442
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong accuracy on choice prediction tasks, but their predictions often violate the economic logic those tasks require: raising a price sometimes increases predicted demand, and implied willingness-to-pay estimates are frequently negative or implausible. We propose a two-stage adapter that embeds foundation model predictions within a utility-maximization framework. In the first stage, we estimate a standard choice model whose parameters are constrained to obey economic theory. In the second stage, we freeze those parameters and train a correction term that incorporates the foundation model's predictions as additional information. The result is a model that inherits the foundation model's accuracy gains while guaranteeing monotonic price-demand relationships under policy perturbation and producing analytically computable trade-off measures. On two transportation datasets, the adapter recovers up to 13 percentage points of accuracy over a standard logit model while maintaining perfect economic consistency, something neither the raw foundation models nor conventional distillation achieve.

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