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Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE): Evaluating an LLM's Willingness to Re-engage in Conversation
Thomas Manuel Rost, Martina Figlia, Bernd Wallraff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09043

Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE): Evaluating an LLM's Willingness to Re-engage in Conversation
We introduce and evaluate Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE), a simple diagnostic signal elicited by asking a Large Language Model a YES or NO question about its willingness to re-engage with a user's behavior after reviewing a short transcript. In a study using a 3-tone (friendly, unclear, abusive) by 10-interaction stimulus set, we tested four open-weight chat models across four framing conditions, resulting in 480 trials. Our findings show that SPICE sharply d…