TabuLM is a new language model pre‑trained on Kinyarwanda tabular data, extending KinyaBERT‑large with row, column, and cell‑type embeddings and a table‑structure attention bias. It introduces two pre‑training objectives—Masked Cell Recovery and Column Type Prediction—and is trained on 172 Rwandan government tables. On the TabQA‑kin benchmark, TabuLM achieves 62.0% exact match, outperforming KinyaBERT‑large and multilingual baselines by significant margins.
By Ireddi Rakshitha, Devavarapu Yashwanth, Ntakirutimana Pierre
KinyaEmbed is the first sentence‑embedding model specifically designed for Kinyarwanda, built on KinyaBERT‑large and trained through a four‑stage curriculum that incorporates paraphrase pairs, translated MNLI triplets, OPUS‑100 translation pairs, and high‑quality KinyaCOMET pairs. It outperforms existing multilingual embeddings on the SemRel2024‑rw benchmark, achieving a Spearman ψ of 0.7298, and introduces the Wiki‑RW‑STS benchmark of 300 contamination‑free Kinyarwanda sentence pairs. All model checkpoints, filtered pairs, and the new benchmark are publicly released.
By Ireddi Rakshitha, Devavarapu Yashwanth, Ntakirutimana Pierre
The paper introduces a reproducible benchmark for evaluating attention mechanisms in tabular foundation models, focusing on the distinct row and column attention patterns that differ from language model attention. It compares several backends—Torch SDPA, FlashAttention variants, vLLM, and SageAttention—across realistic tabular shapes on A100, H100, and B200 GPUs, revealing that optimal backend choice varies by attention type, hardware, and model specifics. The study finds FlashAttention generally performs best, but CuDNN can outperform it for column attention on longer sequences, while SageAttention excels for large row sequences beyond 16k rows.
By Maximilian Schambach, Clemens Biehl, Sam Thelin
Table understanding is a core task in document intelligence, encompassing two key subtasks: table reconstruction and table visual question answering (TabVQA). While recent approaches predominantly rel...
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
By Rasa Hosseinzadeh, Alex Labach, Zexin Xue, Shuyi Han, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
arXiv:2605. 20254v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on NLP tasks, however, their performance on tabular data still needs research attention, because Table Question-Answering (TQA) requires precise cell retrieval and multi-step structured reasoning.
By Amritansh Maurya, Navjot Singh, Mohammed Javed, Omar Moured
Causilo is a new tabular foundation model that delivers state‑of‑the‑art predictive performance while achieving exceptionally fast inference. On the TabArena benchmark it scores 1785.4 Elo with a median inference time of 0.10 seconds per 1 K test samples, outperforming TabPFN‑3.5‑Fast by 31.6% in speed and reaching the performance–efficiency Pareto frontier. The architecture builds on TabICL’s column‑then‑row design, adding a row‑refinement module that exchanges information among cell representations before a final column stage, and uses cross‑attention with a fixed number of summary tokens to keep attention cost linear in the number of features.
By Minyong Cho, Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv:2609.17458v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Table understanding is a core task in document intelligence, encompassing two key subtasks: table reconstruction and table visual question answering...
By Jahanvi Rajput, Dhruv Kudale, Saikiran Kasturi, Utkarsh Verma, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.
By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table. It finds that a table’s usefulness is largely determined by its number of features rather than instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves downstream performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose that tabular in‑context generalization is primarily retrieval‑based, with models learning to identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.
By Nour Shaheen, Junwei Ma, Alex Labach, Frank Hutter, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table, rather than large synthetic or real datasets. It finds that a table’s usefulness for downstream tasks is mainly determined by the number of features, not instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose a task‑centric, retrieval‑based view of in‑context generalization, suggesting that effective TFMs identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.
Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto