INCONVENIENT is a new benchmark that evaluates how machine‑learning models, especially large language models, generalize when trained on convenience samples that bias feature–target relationships. Unlike prior distribution‑shift tests that rely on natural domain splits, INCONVENIENT explicitly perturbs these relationships while keeping the deployment population unchanged, allowing controlled study of shift severity and direction. The benchmark covers 200 tabular classification and regression datasets and produces about 15,500 shifted training distributions, revealing significant performance degradation.
By Sara Rezaeimanesh, Chad Klochko, Kundan Thind, Mohammad Ghassemi
arXiv:2608. 02412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become the default tool for a remarkable range of tasks, yet they have had conspicuously little success at one of the most common machine learning workloads: predictive analytics over tabular data.
By Marta Garnelo, Wojciech M. Czarnecki
arXiv:2610.28556v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can leverage semantic feature names alongside summary statistics for tabular feature selection, yet it remains unclear w...
By Fateme Memar, Dongjie Wang, Arvin Agah
arXiv:2601.17609v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In domains like medicine and finance, large-scale labeled data is costly and often unavailable, leading to models trained on small datasets that st...
By Sara Rezaeimanesh, Kundan Thind, Farzan Siddiqui, Mohammad M. Ghassemi
arXiv:2610.28369v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A growing body of work proposes dynamic expert-skipping methods for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models that adjust the number of experts activated per t...
By Jakob Steimle, Thomas Elsken, Daniel Ehrhardt, Lukas Rinder, Daniel Cremers, Xi Wang
arXiv:2510. 06048v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks.
By Jie Hao, Rui Yu, Wei Zhang, Huixia Wang, Jie Xu, Mingrui Liu
The paper investigates whether training classical machine learning models remains worthwhile when large language models (LLMs) can label tabular data without training. By defining a labeled‑data crossover point (N*) where a trained classical model surpasses a frozen LLM’s flat error, the authors analyze 126 student evaluations of GPT models across 18 datasets and compare them to power‑law learning curves of six classical model families. Results show that in 86% of cases a classical model outperforms the LLM with no more labeled data than already available, and the crossover occurs at a median of about 6% of the training set, suggesting that collecting a few hundred labels and training a gradient‑boosted model is typically advantageous.
By Kaihua Ding
The paper introduces Dr. Post-Training, a framework that treats general training data as a data‑induced regularizer to prevent overfitting to scarce target objectives, rather than merely a pool for selection. It constructs a feasible set of model update directions from general data and projects target‑driven updates onto this set, unifying standard training and existing data‑selection methods as special cases along a bias‑variance spectrum. Experiments on SFT, RLHF, and RLVR demonstrate that these methods outperform both standard training and state‑of‑the‑art data‑selection baselines, especially when general and target data are highly misaligned, while system optimizations keep overhead minimal.
By Pingbang Hu, Xueshen Liu, Z. Morley Mao, Jiaqi W. Ma
The paper investigates how data repetition affects Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models compared to dense Transformers. Across models from 80 M to 1 B active parameters, MoEs degrade more quickly as data is repeated, with performance dropping significantly beyond 4× repetition and overtaking dense models only when strong regularization is applied. The study also identifies routing stabilization and expert specialization as key factors in MoE overfitting, and explores regularization techniques that can partially mitigate this issue.
By Atindra Jha, Margaret Li, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer
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.
By TabLDM Team, Penghui Wang, Wei Liu, Hong Wang, Chengyue Huang, Yuxi Sun, Zirui Wang, Hongming Huang, Quan Wang, Chunxiao Liu, Erli Meng, Bin Wang
arXiv:2607. 20465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quality of training data fundamentally determines the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet no unified benchmark exists to measure how well LLMs, agents, and data-centric workflows actually prepare training data end to end.
By Hao Liang, Qifeng Cai, Yibo Lin, Jianzhuo Du, Qifeng Xia, Sizhe Qiu, Linzhuang Sun, Meiyi Qiang, Zhaoyang Han, Xiaochen Ma, Bohan Zeng, Ruichuan An, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang
arXiv:2606. 12117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.
By Selen Erkan, Bastian Boll, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu