TabPrep: Closing the Feature Engineering Gap in Tabular Benchmarks
arXiv:2606. 02384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in tabular machine learning has largely focused on increasingly sophisticated model architectures.
arXiv:2606. 02384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in tabular machine learning has largely focused on increasingly sophisticated model architectures.
arXiv:2605. 28418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rise of tabular foundation models alongside traditional models still performing well on many tasks, choosing the right model for a tabular dataset remains difficult.
The paper investigates how synthetic pretraining priors used in tabular foundation models (TFMs) influence downstream performance. By reconstructing the synthetic data generators of four TFMs and comparing their generated tasks to two popular tabular benchmarks using structural descriptors, the authors measure structural coverage and normalized density. They find that some generators provide broader and denser support for benchmark tasks, and that stronger synthetic-to-benchmark support generally correlates with better model performance.
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.
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.
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.
Xiaomi-TabLDM is a tabular foundation model that performs classification and regression via in-context learning without task‑specific fine‑tuning. It is pretrained solely on synthetic data from structural causal models, achieving top‑ranked regression results on multiple benchmarks while reducing training and prediction time compared to leading models. The architecture incorporates a three‑stage training strategy, dual‑stream feature grouping, lightweight attention residuals, and sparse mixture‑of‑experts, and it can further improve accuracy through test‑time compute scaling.
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
arXiv:2608. 06137v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data are ubiquitous in real-world applications and are crucial for data-driven prediction and decision-making across science, industry, finance, healthcare, and public services.
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: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.
arXiv:2608. 04174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data are ubiquitous in practical applications, where classification (TSC) and extrinsic regression (TSER) have emerged as essential tasks for obtaining value from temporal sequences.