arXiv Machine Learning

RelICL: Training-free Relational Learning with Tabular Foundation Models

RelICL: Training-free Relational Learning with Tabular Foundation Models proposes a new method for relational learning that addresses two key issues of deep feature synthesis—feature explosion and interaction blindness—by propagating and fusing information step by step through the schema graph using a tabular foundation model. The approach retains the benefits of DFS while improving scalability and performance. Experiments on RelBench tasks show that RelICL performs on par with the strongest DFS-based approach.

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 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 Machine Learning
Sep 24

Support-Compiled Feature Folding: More Evidence at Lower Memory Across Tabular Foundation Models

Support-Compiled Feature Folding (SCFF) is a training‑free inference framework that addresses the feature‑side scaling dilemma in tabular foundation models by routing support‑ranked features through bounded leaves of the native encoder, checking residual evidence, and merging encoded messages for a single contextual prediction. This approach transforms quadratic pairwise mixing into linear‑in‑width work with a bounded local working set, achieving dataset‑macro accuracy and NLL improvements across six backbones on an 18‑dataset wide‑table slice. SCFF delivers significant GPU‑memory savings (median 2.09×–2.36×) and, when constrained by a peak‑memory ceiling, further boosts accuracy by up to 4.06 points over the widest single‑leaf baseline. whyItMatters":"SCFF demonstrates that memory‑efficient inference can simultaneously improve accuracy and reduce resource usage in tabular foundation models, offering a practical solution for deploying these models at scale."

By Tian Zhou, Beverly Jin, Xue Wang, Linxiao Yang, Wenwei Wang, Bingqing Peng, Mengni Ye, Jinjie Gu, Liang Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 18

MetaRTL: Meta-path Attention Enhanced Relational Table Learning

MetaRTL is a two-stage framework for relational table learning that first generates lightweight pre-trained table embeddings and then applies non‑parametric message passing to extract meta‑path features. These features are aggregated using an attention module called MetaAttn, shifting computation from deep GNN stacks to efficient meta‑path aggregation. Experiments on 10 real‑world datasets across 24 tasks show that MetaRTL achieves strong performance while reducing computational cost.

By Ken Zhong, Weichen Li, Zheng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Advancing Open and Reproducible Relational Learning: RelArena-$\alpha$, TabPFN-Rel and RPI

arXiv:2608. 16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This first release of Prior Labs in relational learning shows our continued commitment to open science.

By Adrian Hayler, Klemens Fl\"oge, Alan Arazi, Rishabh Ranjan, Jure Leskovec, Felix Birkel, Brendan Roof, Anurag Garg, Kristina Collins, Lydia Sidhoum, Jonas K\"ubler, Siyuan Guo, Oscar Key, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Rylee Grace, David Salinas, Arthur Cahu, Simon Bing, Benjamin J\"ager, Tuana \c{C}elik, Mihir Manium, Vitor Monteiro, Jake Robertson, Jerry Chen, Eliott Kalfon, Tom\'as Pereda, Lilly Wehrhahn, Dominik Safaric, Tobias Schroeder, Georg Grab, Diana Kriuchkova, Clara Cornu, Philipp Singer, Nick Erickson, Vahid Balazadeh, Marie Salmon, Simone Alessi, K\"ur\c{s}at Kaya, Philipp Jund, L\'eo Grinsztajn, Yann LeCun, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Madelon Hulsebos, Lennart Purucker, Sauraj Gambhir, Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann