Tabular Foundation Models vs Tuned Gradient Boosting for Telecom Churn: A Profit- and Calibration-Aware Evaluation

arXiv:2611.12942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs) predict from a labelled context in a single forward pass. A recent benchmark reported that they decisively outperform tree ensembles for customer churn, but it compared them with untuned gradient-boosted trees (GBDTs) and scored only ranking metrics, while a retention campaign is judged in money. We re-evaluate TabPFN-2.5, TabPFN-3.5, TabPFN-3.5-Fast and TabICL v2 against Optuna-tuned GBDTs on five public telecom churn datasets over 10 seeded splits. We separate three questions: whether a model ranks churners well, whether that ranking earns more expected maximum profit (EMP), and whether its probabilities can drive a threshold policy.