arXiv Machine Learning

TabFORGE: A Tabular Foundation Model for Generative Modelling

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

TabMF: Learning Dataset Representations with Tabular Foundation Models

TabMF is a framework that repurposes pretrained tabular foundation models (TFMs) as encoders for supervised datasets, adding a dataset-level readout and fine‑tuning via contrastive post‑training on synthetic views. The authors instantiate TabMF on TabICLv2 and TabPFN‑2.5 and evaluate the resulting representations on six tasks involving unseen real datasets. The approach achieves the best aggregate performance among both learned and classical dataset representations, excelling in dataset retrieval, compact benchmark construction, and distribution‑shift severity assessment.

By Rafiq Kamel, Nicolas Atienza, Aziz Fouch\'e, Nicola Cancedda, Josif Grabocka
arXiv AI
Sep 10

From Synthetic Priors to Model Behavior: Structural Coverage in Tabular Foundation Models

The paper investigates how synthetic pretraining priors used in tabular foundation models (TFMs) influence downstream performance. By reconstructing the synthetic data generators of four TFMs and comparing their generated tasks to two popular tabular benchmarks using structural descriptors, the authors measure structural coverage and normalized density. They find that some generators provide broader and denser support for benchmark tasks, and that stronger synthetic-to-benchmark support generally correlates with better model performance.

By He Zhao, Ryan Thompson, Daniel M. Steinberg, Ashfaqur Rahman, Edwin V. Bonilla, Cheng Soon Ong
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond IID: How General Are Tabular Foundation Models, Really?

arXiv:2606. 30410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry.

By Lennart Purucker, Andrej Tschalzev, Nick Erickson, Gioia Blayer, David Holzm\"uller, Alan Arazi, Alexander Pfefferle, Mustafa Tajjar, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Frank Hutter
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Towards Pretraining Text Encoders for TabPFN

arXiv:2606. 04876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFN, achieve strong performance on tabular datasets with numerical and categorical data, but do not natively handle high-cardinality text features.

By Mustafa Tajjar, Alexander Pfefferle, Lennart Purucker, Frank Hutter
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Generalization Can Emerge in Tabular Foundation Models From a Single Table

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
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Xiaomi-TabLDM: A Tabular Foundation Model Technical Report

Xiaomi-TabLDM is a tabular foundation model that performs classification and regression via in-context learning without task‑specific fine‑tuning. It is pretrained solely on synthetic data from structural causal models, achieving top‑ranked regression results on multiple benchmarks while reducing training and prediction time compared to leading models. The architecture incorporates a three‑stage training strategy, dual‑stream feature grouping, lightweight attention residuals, and sparse mixture‑of‑experts, and it can further improve accuracy through test‑time compute scaling.

By TabLDM Team, Penghui Wang, Wei Liu, Hong Wang, Chengyue Huang, Yuxi Sun, Zirui Wang, Hongming Huang, Quan Wang, Chunxiao Liu, Erli Meng, Bin Wang
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
Jun 26

Limited Reference, Reliable Generation: A Two-Component Framework for Tabular Data Generation in Low-Data Regimes

arXiv:2509. 09960v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data generation is increasingly essential in machine learning, supporting downstream applications when real-world, high-quality tabular data is insufficient.

By Mingxuan Jiang, Keyang Chen, Yongxin Wang, Yongsheng Zhao, Ziyue Dai, Yicun Liu, Zeping Li, Qiuyang Zhang, Hongyi Nie, Hongbin Zhu, Sen Liu, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

TabFM: A Zero-Shot Foundation Model for Tabular Data

arXiv:2609.37959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular machine learning typically relies on per-dataset workflows, fitting tree ensembles or running AutoML searches from scratch for every task. We p...

By Weihao Kong, Erez Louidor Ilan, Shuxin Nie, Taman Narayan, Rajat Sen, Yichen Zhou, Deqing Fu, Samet Oymak, Abhimanyu Das