arXiv Machine Learning

TabFM: A Zero-Shot Foundation Model for Tabular Data

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Xiaomi-TabLDM: A Tabular Foundation Model Technical Report

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 AI
Sep 15

Generalization Can Emerge in Tabular Foundation Models From a Single Table

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.

By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas
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.

By Pascal Pfeiffer, Dmitry Gordeev, Mathias M\"uller, Laura Fink, Joan Salv\`a Soler, Mark Landry, Branden Murray, Marcos V. Conde, Sri Satish Ambati
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 AI
Jun 30

Beyond IID: How General Are Tabular Foundation Models, Really?

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
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
Sep 25

TabSieve: Explicit In-Table Evidence Selection for Tabular Prediction

TabSieve is a select‑then‑predict framework that explicitly chooses a small set of informative rows from a table as evidence before predicting a missing target. The authors build a large synthetic dataset, TabSieve‑SFT‑40K, and introduce a reinforcement learning method, TAB‑GRPO, to jointly optimize evidence selection and prediction. Experiments on 75 classification and 52 regression tables show consistent performance gains, with TabSieve improving classification by 2.92% and regression by 4.45% over the best baseline while enhancing robustness to noisy context.

By Yongyao Wang, Ziqi Miao, Lu Yang, Haonan Jia, Wenting Yan, Chen Qian, Lijun Li
arXiv AI
Aug 19

ARASH: Adaptive Retrieval And Shot Selection for Tabular Prediction

ARASH is a method that improves the efficiency of Tabular Foundation Models by selecting optimal few-shot prompts based on local neighborhood analysis within the training set. It reduces the prompt length and memory usage of TabPFN by 1261.5× and 2.56×, respectively, while maintaining comparable accuracy. This approach addresses the challenge of identifying relevant rows for in-context learning in tabular data.

By Samirasadat Jamalidinan, Yue Xu, Kazem Cheshmi