arXiv Machine Learning

LAB-Tab: LLM-Augmented Bayesian Network Adaptation for Few-Shot Tabular Generation

arXiv:2608. 01879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data generation supports analysis and decision-making when target-domain data are scarce, yet collecting complete target samples is often costly.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

INCONVENIENT: A Benchmark to Assess LLM Generalization Capabilities from Convenience Samples

INCONVENIENT is a new benchmark that evaluates how machine‑learning models, especially large language models, generalize when trained on convenience samples that bias feature–target relationships. Unlike prior distribution‑shift tests that rely on natural domain splits, INCONVENIENT explicitly perturbs these relationships while keeping the deployment population unchanged, allowing controlled study of shift severity and direction. The benchmark covers 200 tabular classification and regression datasets and produces about 15,500 shifted training distributions, revealing significant performance degradation.

By Sara Rezaeimanesh, Chad Klochko, Kundan Thind, Mohammad Ghassemi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions

The paper critically evaluates common few‑shot learning protocols that rely on pre‑training a model on a large auxiliary set with classes disjoint from the target but drawn from the same visual domain. By comparing no pre‑training, class‑disjoint in‑domain pre‑training, supervised out‑of‑domain pre‑training, and label‑free out‑of‑domain pre‑training across eight datasets and three architectures, the authors find that in‑domain pre‑training yields a 33.41‑point average improvement, while out‑of‑domain pre‑training offers a 23.75‑point gain, revealing a 9.66‑point optimistic bias due to domain overlap. They also demonstrate that a label‑free augmentation strategy can match supervised out‑of‑domain performance and propose a descriptor‑based source‑selection method that closely approximates oracle selection, underscoring the need to move beyond in‑domain pre‑training as the default evaluation protocol.

By Alejandro Galan-Cuenca, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Antonio Javier Gallego
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 21

Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification for Bridging Semantic Gaps in Black-Box Domain Adaptation

The paper introduces Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification (DDSR), a method for black-box domain adaptation that fuses predictions from a black-box source model and a vision‑language model to generate reliable pseudo‑labels for the target domain. DDSR uses adaptive prediction fusion, subnetwork regularization to prevent overfitting, iterative refinement of pseudo‑labels and prompts, and class‑wise prototypes for self‑training. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that DDSR outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art approaches, even those that have access to source data or source model parameters.

By Zhe Zhang, Jing Li, Wanli Xue, Xu Cheng, Jianhua Zhang, Qinghua Hu, Shengyong Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Bridging the Data Gap: Source-Informed Task-Space Transport for Few-Shot Diffusion

The paper introduces Meta‑Diff, a method that learns a reusable source‑to‑target relation in a compact task space, enabling rapid adaptation of a diffusion model to new targets with minimal or no target data. By encoding each distribution into a low‑dimensional coordinate and transporting a source coordinate to its predicted target, the approach avoids costly fine‑tuning and achieves significant performance gains on CIFAR‑100 and Office‑Home benchmarks. Experiments show that when task identity is preserved, the relation generalizes across tasks, and the source‑target shift is manageable, Meta‑Diff can outperform target‑only modeling and full fine‑tuning. whyItMatters:"The method offers a practical solution for few‑shot adaptation in data‑scarce settings, such as healthcare, by reducing computational cost and improving reliability compared to traditional retraining approaches."

By Jinjian Jiang, Jing Peng, Rehan Deen, Yu Cao, Ziquan Liu, Muhammad Salman Haleem, David Mguni
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

TabCausal: Pretraining Across Causal Environments for Tabular Causal Discovery

TabCausal is a causal discovery foundation model that learns to map datasets directly to causal graphs by pretraining across diverse causal environments. It uses a dynamic task construction strategy to expose the model to varied graph priors, mechanisms, noise models, dimensions, sample sizes, and intervention regimes, improving transferability from observational and mixed‑interventional data. On large synthetic benchmarks and a new protocol‑guided semantic benchmark, TabCausal outperforms many classical baselines and shows robust structure recovery, especially when interventional evidence is available.

By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye