arXiv Machine Learning

Below what training size do deep tabular generators stop beating trivial baselines? A preregistered benchmark on a size ladder of clinical and standard datasets

The study benchmarks seven deep tabular generative models against trivial baselines across a size ladder of 8 public datasets (200–20,000 rows) and 4 small clinical datasets, totaling 2,220 runs. Using AUROC of classifiers trained on synthetic data and tested on real data, it finds that in 23 of 24 model–dataset pairs no deep model surpasses the best trivial baseline beyond seed noise, and the best baseline wins 40 of 49 evaluated cells. Rankings of deep models are relatively stable below 5,000 rows, but the top two methods often differ by less than seed variation, and rankings on small clinical datasets only moderately align with those on subsampled large datasets.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

TabBench-Bio: A Living Benchmark for Machine Learning on High-Dimensional Biomedical Tables

TabBench-Bio is a living, interactive benchmark that evaluates machine learning models on 43 high‑dimensional biomedical tables, covering multiple domains. Using a shared cross‑validation protocol, the benchmark compares classical estimators, neural networks, and tabular foundation models across 28 feature‑by‑sample operating points, with RealTabPFN v2.5 achieving the highest performance at the reference cell of 10,000 features and 100 training samples. The benchmark provides reproducible results, fold‑level predictions, and invites community contributions to expand its dataset collection.

By Jules Kreuer, Sofiane Ouaari, Julia Hellmig, Julius Braitinger, Nico Pfeifer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

TabICLv2: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model

TabICLv2 is a new state‑of‑the‑art tabular foundation model that outperforms existing methods on regression and classification tasks. It relies on a synthetic data generation engine for diverse pretraining, architectural innovations such as a scalable softmax attention, and optimized training protocols that replace AdamW with the Muon optimizer. On the TabArena and TALENT benchmarks, TabICLv2 surpasses the current best model, RealTabPFN‑2.5, without any tuning, while also being faster and capable of handling million‑scale datasets with limited GPU memory.

By Jingang Qu, David Holzm\"uller, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Marine Le Morvan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Is It Still Worth Training a Classical Model in the Era of LLMs? A Crossover Benchmark on Tabular Data

The paper investigates whether training classical machine learning models remains worthwhile when large language models (LLMs) can label tabular data without training. By defining a labeled‑data crossover point (N*) where a trained classical model surpasses a frozen LLM’s flat error, the authors analyze 126 student evaluations of GPT models across 18 datasets and compare them to power‑law learning curves of six classical model families. Results show that in 86% of cases a classical model outperforms the LLM with no more labeled data than already available, and the crossover occurs at a median of about 6% of the training set, suggesting that collecting a few hundred labels and training a gradient‑boosted model is typically advantageous.

By Kaihua Ding
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Demographically-Conditioned Synthetic Medical Images for Bias Mitigation and Bias Detection in Disease Classifiers

arXiv:2607. 14984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect.

By Mahmoud Ibrahim, Bart Elen, Chang Sun, Gokhan Ertaylan, Michel Dumontier
arXiv AI
Jun 29

When Is an LLM Worth It for Hyperparameter Optimization? A Budget-Matched Study on Tabular Data Finds the Warm-Start Is a Default Configuration, Not the Model

arXiv:2606. 21641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as hyperparameter-optimization (HPO) advisors that "warm-start" search from prior knowledge, proposing strong configurations in very few evaluations.

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas, Isaiah Abner DCosta, Nithish Kumar Prabhakaran
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction

arXiv:2605. 18383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present TabH2O, a foundation model for tabular data that performs classification and regression in a single forward pass via in-context learning.

By Pascal Pfeiffer, Dmitry Gordeev, Mathias M\"uller, Laura Fink, Joan Salv\`a Soler, Mark Landry, Branden Murray, Marcos V. Conde, Sri Satish Ambati