No Need to Train Your RDB Foundation Model
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. 05476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a relational database (RDB) storing heterogeneous tabular information, how can we predict missing (or future) values in some target column of interest?
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: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:2607. 03659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) are the primary data infrastructure in many enterprises, yet recent deep learning methods designed for RDBs have been evaluated under inconsistent experimental protocols, making fair comparison difficult.
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.
arXiv:2606. 03040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases underpin modern enterprise, scientific, and healthcare systems, yet predictive machine learning on such data remains challenging due to their multi-table, heterogeneous, and temporal structure.
arXiv:2609.01292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Relational Deep Learning (RDL) has become a powerful paradigm for learning from multi-tabular data. However, manually defining RDL prediction tasks i...
The paper demonstrates that a tabular foundation model can achieve strong generalization using only a single real table for self‑supervised pre‑training, challenging the belief that large synthetic or real datasets are necessary. By systematically pre‑training and evaluating across diverse benchmarks, the authors show that the number and quality of tasks that can be derived from a dataset are critical for downstream performance. This finding suggests that carefully constructed task sets from limited data can enable effective transfer learning in tabular models.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 11374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains.
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 investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can leverage frozen relational‑transformer embeddings by injecting them as soft tokens. Using a learned MLP projection and LoRA adaptation, the authors fine‑tune Qwen3.5‑4B on chain‑of‑thought reasoning traces and group‑based reinforcement learning, then evaluate on ten binary classification tasks across six RelBench databases. The hybrid approach consistently underperforms the standalone relational transformer, showing sensitivity to serialization format, token budget, and RL stability, leading the authors to conclude that stronger alignment objectives and schema‑aware design are needed for reliable relational prediction.