arXiv Machine Learning By Jonas M. K\"ubler, Benjamin J\"ager, Klemens Fl\"oge, Noah Hollmann, Frank Hutter

Attention Quantization for Tabular Foundation Models

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The paper introduces a quantization technique for tabular foundation models that focuses on converting queries, keys, and values to FP8 and employing explicit FP8 matrix multiplication to accelerate attention calculations. It emphasizes aligning quantization errors between training and test rows to avoid accuracy loss, and demonstrates up to 1.7× speedup over 16‑bit kernels with no significant accuracy degradation on TabPFN‑v3 and TabICLv2 across TabArena and BeyondArena.

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