arXiv:2607. 05476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a relational database (RDB) storing heterogeneous tabular information, how can we predict missing (or future) values in some target column of interest?
By Linjie Xu, David Wipf
arXiv:2607. 29129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) require large-scale synthetic relational databases for pretraining, but existing approaches tightly couple data generation with the model training pipeline.
By Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Viswanath Ganapathy
arXiv:2606. 30336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce FlexTab, a flexible encoder-decoder architecture for in-context learning on tabular data that pairs a single, task-agnostic encoder with a suite of task-specific decoders.
By Marek Polewczyk, Maximilian Schambach, Marco Spinaci, Sam Thelin, Johannes H\"ohne
arXiv:2608. 10837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The strong performance of foundation models for tabular tasks comes at substantial inference costs.
By Mykhailo Koshil, Matthias Feurer, Katharina Eggensperger
STEER is a sampling method for relational foundation models that reduces inference cost by focusing on the most relevant tables for a prediction task. It uses a large language model to rank foreign‑key edges in the database schema into relevance tiers, then assigns traversal probabilities based on these tiers. Evaluated on three state‑of‑the‑art RFMs, STEER cuts inference context size by roughly 40% on average while preserving or improving accuracy.
By Abdalla Mohamed, Ashraf Aboulnaga
The paper demonstrates that a tabular foundation model can achieve strong generalization using only a single real table for self‑supervised pre‑training, challenging the belief that large synthetic or real datasets are necessary. By systematically pre‑training and evaluating across diverse benchmarks, the authors show that the number and quality of tasks that can be derived from a dataset are critical for downstream performance. This finding suggests that carefully constructed task sets from limited data can enable effective transfer learning in tabular models.
By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas
We introduce FlexTab, a flexible encoder-decoder architecture for in-context learning on tabular data that pairs a single, task-agnostic encoder with a suite of task-specific decoders. Unlike existing tabular in-context learners, which entangle feature representations with a specific prediction target, our design produces \textit{target-agnostic} row embeddings that can be leveraged across a wide range of downstream tasks within a table-native in-context learning setup.
arXiv:2607. 03659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) are the primary data infrastructure in many enterprises, yet recent deep learning methods designed for RDBs have been evaluated under inconsistent experimental protocols, making fair comparison difficult.
By Kazi F. Akhter, Bharath Ajendla, Manar D. Samad
arXiv:2602. 04029v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) facilitate data-driven decision-making by learning from complex multi-table databases.
By Vignesh Kothapalli, Rishabh Ranjan, Valter Hudovernik, Vijay Prakash Dwivedi, Johannes Hoffart, Carlos Guestrin, Jure Leskovec
The paper investigates a new failure mode in relational in-context learning called support‑set target leakage, where target‑derived features appear only in the labeled support set and not in the query. The authors create 14 synthetic leaker types across 20 columns, evaluate a frozen relational encoder on RelBench databases, and use Integrated Gradients to identify and mitigate the most harmful leakers. Results show that target‑table leakers degrade performance most, while one‑ and two‑hop leakers are less consistently exploited, and that IG can partially recover performance by removing high‑ranked leakers.
By Roshan Reddy Upendra, Alexandre Dorais, Joe Meyer, Andrew Pouret, Anastasios Lambrianos Stappas, Dinesh Katupputhur Ramprasath, Tom Palczewski, Minghua Li
arXiv:2606. 04320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) promise a single pre-trained predictor that, given any relational database, returns predictions in one forward pass via relational in-context learning (ICL).
By Zhikai Chen, Junyu Yin, Jialiang Gu, Siheng Xiong, Xiaoze Liu, Ruowang Zhang, Keren Zhou, Kai Guo
arXiv:2605. 31272v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As predictive models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as credit approval, there is a growing need for post-hoc methods that provide recourse to affected individuals.
By Wenshuo Dong, Jiaming Zhang, Shaopeng Fu, Hongbin Lin, Di Wang, Lijie Hu