The paper introduces TEmBed, a unified benchmark for evaluating tabular embeddings across four representation levels—cell, row, column, and table—using a diverse set of models. It demonstrates that the best model depends on the specific task and representation level, providing practical guidance for selecting embeddings in real-world applications. The study aims to facilitate the development of more general-purpose tabular representation models.
By Liane Vogel, Kavitha Srinivas, Niharika D'Souza, Sola Shirai, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Horst Samulowitz
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
arXiv:2607. 24130v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular data is the dominant structured-data modality, and learning table representations has become a core research direction.
By Ayeen Poostforoushan, Liane Vogel, Carsten Binnig
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.
By Wenshuo Dong, Jiaming Zhang, Shaopeng Fu, Hongbin Lin, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
Tabular data is the dominant structured-data modality, and learning table representations has become a core research direction. Table-level embeddings in particular underpin a wide range of applications, including table retrieval, data lake discovery, and table classification.
arXiv:2609.16069v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Synthetic tabular data can match real data distributions while still violating the semantic constraints that govern valid tabular rows. This reveals...
By Yili Wang, Ruxue Shi, Mengnan Du, Hangting Ye, Yi Chang, Xin Wang
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.
By Nour Shaheen, Junwei Ma, Alex Labach, Frank Hutter, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
The paper examines how new vocabulary tokens are added to language models for generative recommendation tasks. It shows that the common practice of initializing these tokens as the mean of existing embeddings collapses them into a degenerate subspace, hindering fine‑tuning. The authors propose Grounded Token Initialization (GTI), which places new tokens at semantically meaningful positions in the pretrained embedding space using linguistic supervision, and demonstrate that GTI outperforms mean initialization and other adaptation methods across several benchmarks.
By Daiwei Chen, Zhoutong Fu, Chengming Jiang, Haichao Zhang, Ran Zhou, Tan Wang, Chunnan Yao, Guoyao Li, Rui Cai, Yihan Cao, Ruijie Jiang, Fedor Borisyuk, Jianqiang Shen, Jingwei Wu, Ramya Korlakai Vinayak
arXiv:2606. 14047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language modeling requires not only extending context windows but maintaining coherent understanding of entity states and relationships across thousands of tokens -- a challenge that semantic similarity alone cannot address.
By Ghadir Alselwi, Basem Suleiman, Hao Xue, Shoaib Jameel, Hakim Hacid, Flora D. Salim, Imran Razzak
arXiv:2609.26658v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Integrating heterogeneous datasets within data lakes is a critical challenge, particularly for semantically related tables that lack the explicit att...
By Md Ataur Rahman, Dimitris Sacharidis, Oscar Romero, Sergi Nadal
H2Table introduces a hierarchical hypergraph representation for complex tables, enabling a hypergraph encoder to capture semantic relationships between headers and cells. The framework uses learnable query vectors to extract structural embeddings for large language models. Experiments on the HiTab dataset show a 22.88% improvement over state‑of‑the‑art baselines on tables with four levels of nesting.
By Jia Ling, Yangfan Wang, Chen Tang, Haoming Tan, Yang Yang, Yi Guan, Jingchi Jiang
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.