The paper presents a method for distilling tabular foundation models (TFMs) into lightweight, dataset‑specific students. By using the full labeled training set as teacher context and training students on both observed and synthetic queries, the authors achieve significant performance gains over traditional supervised models on TabArena and TALENT benchmarks. The distilled students also provide substantial inference speedups, reducing the cost of repeated inference.
By Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo
RelICL: Training-free Relational Learning with Tabular Foundation Models proposes a new method for relational learning that addresses two key issues of deep feature synthesis—feature explosion and interaction blindness—by propagating and fusing information step by step through the schema graph using a tabular foundation model. The approach retains the benefits of DFS while improving scalability and performance. Experiments on RelBench tasks show that RelICL performs on par with the strongest DFS-based approach.
By Simon Forbat, Rainer Gemulla
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
arXiv:2402. 14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality.
By Zichang Liu, Qingyun Liu, Yuening Li, Liang Liu, Anshumali Shrivastava, Shuchao Bi, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi, Zhe Zhao
arXiv:2606. 02384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in tabular machine learning has largely focused on increasingly sophisticated model architectures.
By Andrej Tschalzev, Nick Erickson, Yuyang Wang, Huzefa Rangwala, Stefan L\"udtke, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Christian Bartelt
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
By Rasa Hosseinzadeh, Alex Labach, Zexin Xue, Shuyi Han, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
arXiv:2608. 03565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While modern tabular learners excel at capturing statistical patterns, they frequently operate in a semantic vacuum, treating textual features as discrete symbols, ignoring the rich semantics inherent in feature names or cell entries.
By G\"unther Schindler, Maximilian Schambach, Johannes H\"ohne
arXiv:2606. 25488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is widely used to obtain compact models for efficient inference in resource-constrained environments.
By Yifan Wu, Yiqi Wang, Xichen Ye, Wenjing Yan, Xiaoqiang Li, Cheng Jin, Xiangyu Yue, Weizhong Zhang
Support-Compiled Feature Folding (SCFF) is a training‑free inference framework that addresses the feature‑side scaling dilemma in tabular foundation models by routing support‑ranked features through bounded leaves of the native encoder, checking residual evidence, and merging encoded messages for a single contextual prediction. This approach transforms quadratic pairwise mixing into linear‑in‑width work with a bounded local working set, achieving dataset‑macro accuracy and NLL improvements across six backbones on an 18‑dataset wide‑table slice. SCFF delivers significant GPU‑memory savings (median 2.09×–2.36×) and, when constrained by a peak‑memory ceiling, further boosts accuracy by up to 4.06 points over the widest single‑leaf baseline.
whyItMatters":"SCFF demonstrates that memory‑efficient inference can simultaneously improve accuracy and reduce resource usage in tabular foundation models, offering a practical solution for deploying these models at scale."
By Tian Zhou, Beverly Jin, Xue Wang, Linxiao Yang, Wenwei Wang, Bingqing Peng, Mengni Ye, Jinjie Gu, Liang Sun
arXiv:2606. 03052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a powerful tool for model compression, yet the precise mechanisms by which student models acquire feature representations remain underexplored.
By Seungu Kang, Songkuk Kim
arXiv:2609.37989v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong zero-shot accuracy on structured data by pretraining on synthetic tables, but they ignore the column names, ta...
By Deqing Fu, Huangyuan Su, Rajat Sen, Taman Narayan, Sujay Sanghavi, Abhimanyu Das, Weihao Kong
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