arXiv:2605. 24417v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Supervised classification on tabular data remains a central machine learning task, but its dependence on large labeled datasets limits its applicability in data-scarce settings.
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...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot tabular learning provides a cost-effective approach for real-world applications where annotation is costly and collecting sufficient samples for new tasks is difficult.
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.
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.
arXiv:2512. 10244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones.
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.
arXiv:2602. 23197v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations.
arXiv:2606. 07527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing paradigm for training LLMs has evolved to rely on a massive post-training phase consisting of SFT and RL.
arXiv:2609.39639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular learning uses structured data to predict target outcomes. Traditionally, this process has relied on labeled data. However, large language model...
TabSieve is a select‑then‑predict framework that explicitly chooses a small set of informative rows from a table as evidence before predicting a missing target. The authors build a large synthetic dataset, TabSieve‑SFT‑40K, and introduce a reinforcement learning method, TAB‑GRPO, to jointly optimize evidence selection and prediction. Experiments on 75 classification and 52 regression tables show consistent performance gains, with TabSieve improving classification by 2.92% and regression by 4.45% over the best baseline while enhancing robustness to noisy context.