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.
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. 03565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While modern tabular learners excel at capturing statistical patterns, they frequently operate in a semantic vacuum, treating textual features as discrete symbols, ignoring the rich semantics inherent in feature names or cell entries.
By G\"unther Schindler, Maximilian Schambach, Johannes H\"ohne
arXiv:2606. 09323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular encoders are usually evaluated inside task-specific end-to-end pipelines, so models from different training paradigms are difficult to compare directly even when they operate on similar tabular signals.
By Wei Pang, Xiangru Jian, Hehan Li, Zhixuan Yu, Alex Xue, Jinyang Li, Zhengyuan Dong, Xinjian Zhao, Hao Xu, Chao Zhang, Reynold Cheng, M. Tamer \"Ozsu, Tianshu Yu
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.
By Lennart Purucker, Andrej Tschalzev, Nick Erickson, Gioia Blayer, David Holzm\"uller, Alan Arazi, Alexander Pfefferle, Mustafa Tajjar, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Frank Hutter
arXiv:2602. 10441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data lakes have become a fundamental platform for large-scale machine learning by enabling flexible management of heterogeneous data.
By Feiyu Pan, Tianbin Zhang, Aoqian Zhang, Yu Sun, Zheng Wang, Lixing Chen, Li Pan, Jianhua Li
Upgrading embedding models typically requires expensive database re-indexing, as new query embeddings are incompatible with existing database embeddings. While Backward Compatible Training (BCT) mitig...
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
We introduce FlexTab, a flexible encoder-decoder architecture for in-context learning on tabular data that pairs a single, task-agnostic encoder with a suite of task-specific decoders. Unlike existing tabular in-context learners, which entangle feature representations with a specific prediction target, our design produces \textit{target-agnostic} row embeddings that can be leveraged across a wide range of downstream tasks within a table-native in-context learning setup.
Retrieval in the SQL setting has largely been studied as the task of finding, within a large collection of SQL statements, the statement that answers a natural-language question. At scale, however, a more fundamental retrieval problem precedes generation: schema retrieval, identifying the tables and columns a question requires in a database that may contain thousands of them, far more than fit in a model's context.
arXiv:2601.13111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes...
By Hassan Soliman, Vivek Gupta, Dan Roth, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2606. 30336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce FlexTab, a flexible encoder-decoder architecture for in-context learning on tabular data that pairs a single, task-agnostic encoder with a suite of task-specific decoders.
By Marek Polewczyk, Maximilian Schambach, Marco Spinaci, Sam Thelin, Johannes H\"ohne