Foundation models for tables and relational databases are increasingly used for predictive tasks across various scientific and industrial domains. However, adapting existing models to unseen datasets...
STEER is a sampling method for relational foundation models that reduces inference cost by focusing on the most relevant tables for a prediction task. It uses a large language model to rank foreign‑key edges in the database schema into relevance tiers, then assigns traversal probabilities based on these tiers. Evaluated on three state‑of‑the‑art RFMs, STEER cuts inference context size by roughly 40% on average while preserving or improving accuracy.
The paper introduces FlockMTL, an extension for database management systems that deeply integrates large language models and retrieval‑augmented generation into DuckDB. It provides model‑driven scalar and aggregate functions, cost‑based optimizations like batching and caching, and new SQL DDL abstractions (PROMPT and MODEL) to treat LLMs as first‑class schema objects. These features aim to simplify the development of knowledge‑intensive analytical applications by reducing the effort required to orchestrate heterogeneous data systems and manage LLM context.
arXiv:2606. 04320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) promise a single pre-trained predictor that, given any relational database, returns predictions in one forward pass via relational in-context learning (ICL).
arXiv:2602. 13697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) contain vast amounts of heterogeneous tabular information that can be exploited for predictive modeling purposes.
arXiv:2607. 29129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) require large-scale synthetic relational databases for pretraining, but existing approaches tightly couple data generation with the model training pipeline.
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.
arXiv:2608. 13023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-tabular databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs to enable end-to-end representation learning.
arXiv:2610.16990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular data generation aims to synthesize realistic samples from limited observations while faithfully capturing the underlying data distribution. T...
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
The paper investigates how test‑time compute techniques—adaptation, aggregation, and context construction—can improve predictions of pretrained tabular foundation models (TFMs). It introduces DiagScale, a lightweight adaptation method that trains a minuscule fraction of parameters yet matches full fine‑tuning gains, and shows that selective aggregation of predictions from diverse preprocessing variants can reduce error, while broader context expansion offers inconsistent benefits. The study concludes that adaptation and selective aggregation consistently yield benchmark‑level improvements, but their combined use demands more computation, guiding strategy selection based on available resources.
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.