arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1
Probing Memorization of Tabular In-Context Learning
arXiv:2606. 31208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large tabular models (LTMs), i.
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.
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arXiv AI
Jul 20
When Perplexity Lies: Generation-Focused Distillation of Hybrid Sequence Models
arXiv:2603. 26556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14
TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction
arXiv:2605. 18383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present TabH2O, a foundation model for tabular data that performs classification and regression in a single forward pass via in-context learning.
arXiv AI
2d ago
MentorPulse: Refreshing Cross-Model Latent Guidance for Long-Form Generation
MentorPulse introduces a method for refreshing cross‑model latent guidance during long‑form generation. By compressing mentor states into a capped slot memory and updating it incrementally as new tokens are generated, the approach keeps the guidance signal fresh without resetting the student’s KV cache. Across thirteen datasets, MentorPulse closes more than half of the mentor‑student performance gap, outperforming existing techniques such as C2C, T2T, and LoRA, especially on long outputs.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10
Density Field State Space Models: 1-Bit Distillation, Efficient Inference, and Knowledge Organization in Mamba-2
arXiv:2606. 10932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Density Field State Space Models (DF-SSM), a framework for compressing SSMs to a 1-bit scaffold with int8 low-rank correction.
arXiv AI
1d ago
Model of Models: When Does Emitting a Specialist Beat Attending, Adapting, or Tuning?
arXiv:2608.21386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a task described by a few examples, how should a model be specialized to it? Four mechanisms are available -- zero-shot, in-context attention,...
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 30
Deterministic Decisions for High-Stakes AI. A Zero-Egress Pipeline with the Deployability of RAG and the Accuracy of Machine Learning
arXiv:2606. 29280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction.
arXiv AI
Jun 3
q0: Primitives for Hyper-Epoch Pretraining
arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4
Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction
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.
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 AI
Jul 13
GrAInS: Gradient-based Attribution for Inference-Time Steering of LLMs and VLMs
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.