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:2603. 10823v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep generative models can help with data scarcity and privacy by producing synthetic training data, but they struggle in low-data, imbalanced tabular settings to fully learn the complex data distribution.
By Xiaofeng Lin, Seungbae Kim, Zhuoya Li, Zachary DeSoto, Charles Fleming, Guang Cheng
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
The paper introduces In-Table Prediction (ITB), a self‑supervised task where deep neural networks learn to predict any column in a table from the remaining columns. It proposes a novel neural layer to handle missing continuous values, generates synthetic datasets with controlled column relationships, and evaluates three architectures—MLP, ResNet, and Transformer—showing that attention‑based Transformers perform best when ample training data and large embeddings are used. The study is limited to synthetic, small‑column tables and is presented as an initial investigation rather than a comprehensive real‑world analysis.
By Xiao Zhao, Daniela Oelke
arXiv:2605. 18383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present TabH2O, a foundation model for tabular data that performs classification and regression in a single forward pass via in-context learning.
By Pascal Pfeiffer, Dmitry Gordeev, Mathias M\"uller, Laura Fink, Joan Salv\`a Soler, Mark Landry, Branden Murray, Marcos V. Conde, Sri Satish Ambati
arXiv:2506. 18421v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The majority of data in businesses and industries is stored in tables, databases, and data warehouses.
By Ce Li, Xiaofan Liu, Zhiyan Song, Ce Chi, Boshen Shi, Chen Zhao, Guanguang Chang, Zhendong Wang, Kexin Yang, Xing Wang, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng
arXiv:2607. 19847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting missing cell values in tabular data is a fundamental problem in data cleaning.
By Yurong Liu, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong, Junjie Xing, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang, Surajit Chaudhuri
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
arXiv:2608. 16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spreadsheets are a primary medium for publishing tabular data, yet automatically extracting structured content from them remains difficult due to heterogeneous layouts, diverse file formats, and inconsistent organizational conventions.
By Antoine Gauquier, Ioana Manolescu, Pierre Senellart
arXiv:2609.37989v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong zero-shot accuracy on structured data by pretraining on synthetic tables, but they ignore the column names, ta...
By Deqing Fu, Huangyuan Su, Rajat Sen, Taman Narayan, Sujay Sanghavi, Abhimanyu Das, Weihao Kong
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.
GENSCRIPT is an inference‑only pipeline that generates synthetic data without training a generative model. It creates a deterministic statistical profile of the source data, uses a language model to infer field semantics and cross‑column constraints, and then compiles these into an executable sampler that works for single‑table, temporal, and relational data. The method builds generators in minutes, samples large datasets quickly, and achieves fidelity comparable to leading methods while preserving key data relationships such as 1‑to‑1 mappings and primary‑foreign key constraints.
By Zilong Zhao, Abdul Raheem, Jiayu Li, Sohei Arisaka, Darius Lim Hong Yi, Milad Abdollahzadeh, Uzair Javaid, Biplab Sikdar