arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

TabFM: A Zero-Shot Foundation Model for Tabular Data

arXiv:2609.37959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular machine learning typically relies on per-dataset workflows, fitting tree ensembles or running AutoML searches from scratch for every task. We p...

By Weihao Kong, Erez Louidor Ilan, Shuxin Nie, Taman Narayan, Rajat Sen, Yichen Zhou, Deqing Fu, Samet Oymak, Abhimanyu Das
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 Machine Learning
Aug 31

SOMTab: Set-Order Mamba for Efficient Tabular In-Context Learning

SOMTab is a Set-Order Mamba architecture designed for efficient tabular in-context learning. It separates representation construction from query-conditioned retrieval, using Mamba-based state‑space mixing to build compact row and column representations while retaining attention for final prediction. The model, along with a synthetic prior called DCH‑TailMix, achieves performance comparable to Transformer‑based tabular foundation models but with faster inference and lower GPU memory usage.

By Hao Wang, Siyu Zhang, Wei Ma
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