arXiv Machine Learning

Probing Memorization of Tabular In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606. 31208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large tabular models (LTMs), i.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Understanding the Surprising Generalization Properties of Tabular Foundation Models

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Extractable Memorization From First Principles

arXiv:2607. 12649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on extractable memorization in LLMs suffers from two contrasting validity problems.

By A. Feder Cooper, Marika Swanberg, Jamie Hayes, Lea Duesterwald, Christopher De Sa, Daniel E. Ho, Mark A. Lemley, Percy Liang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Understanding the Surprising Generalization Properties of Tabular Foundation Models

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 Machine Learning
Aug 20

GEAR: Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring for Two-Stage Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models

GEAR is a two‑stage framework that distills tabular foundation models into lightweight MLP or tree‑based predictors for efficient CPU deployment. In the first stage, synthetic covariates are used as teacher‑query locations to train the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. The second stage re‑anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out‑of‑fold teacher predictions, preventing self‑labeling leakage and improving performance. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena show that GEAR‑distilled MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by up to 2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.35 on multiclass tasks, and also outperform CatBoost, while dramatically reducing inference time and memory usage.

By Qi Qin, Jiajie Zhu, Dali Chen, Yuzhao Zhang, Jia-Xing Han, Yu Su, Peng Zhang, Ying Yan, Yifan Sun
arXiv AI
3d ago

Mitigating Memorization In Language Models

The paper explores ways to reduce the memorization of training data in language models, testing three regularizer-based, three finetuning-based, and eleven machine unlearning methods—five of which are newly introduced. It introduces TinyMem, a lightweight suite of small models for rapid testing of these mitigation techniques, and shows that unlearning methods, particularly BalancedSubnet, outperform others in removing memorized content while maintaining task performance. The study also finds that regularizer-based approaches are slow and ineffective, while finetuning methods are costly, especially when high accuracy is required.

By Mansi Sakarvadia, Aswathy Ajith, Arham Khan, Nathaniel Hudson, Caleb Geniesse, Kyle Chard, Yaoqing Yang, Ian Foster, Michael W. Mahoney
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

What Do Tabular Foundation Models Compute In Context? In-Situ Representation Refinement through Attention-Gated Updates

The paper introduces RefineICL, an attention‑gated, feed‑forward‑network‑free framework that refines representations in situ for tabular foundation models. By using support labels to guide episode‑specific updates, the method transfers learned corrections to unlabeled queries without altering model parameters, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on AMLB29 and TabArena benchmarks. Experiments and internal interventions demonstrate that intermediate support updates are essential for constructing task‑specific predictors in context.

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