The paper introduces a reproducible benchmark for evaluating attention mechanisms in tabular foundation models, focusing on the distinct row and column attention patterns that differ from language model attention. It compares several backends—Torch SDPA, FlashAttention variants, vLLM, and SageAttention—across realistic tabular shapes on A100, H100, and B200 GPUs, revealing that optimal backend choice varies by attention type, hardware, and model specifics. The study finds FlashAttention generally performs best, but CuDNN can outperform it for column attention on longer sequences, while SageAttention excels for large row sequences beyond 16k rows.
By Maximilian Schambach, Clemens Biehl, Sam Thelin
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
TabICLv2 is a new state‑of‑the‑art tabular foundation model that outperforms existing methods on regression and classification tasks. It relies on a synthetic data generation engine for diverse pretraining, architectural innovations such as a scalable softmax attention, and optimized training protocols that replace AdamW with the Muon optimizer. On the TabArena and TALENT benchmarks, TabICLv2 surpasses the current best model, RealTabPFN‑2.5, without any tuning, while also being faster and capable of handling million‑scale datasets with limited GPU memory.
By Jingang Qu, David Holzm\"uller, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Marine Le Morvan
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:2606. 07345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, exemplified by TabPFN, perform prediction via in-context learning, inferring test labels directly from labeled training examples.
By Si-Yang Liu, Han-Jia Ye
Tydra is a hybrid Transformer‑State Space Model that interleaves attention and SSM layers for tabular in‑context learning. It achieves a 30% reduction in inference time compared to the Transformer‑only TabPFN while preserving most of its predictive performance. On 30 OpenML datasets, Tydra also outperforms a Hydra model that is roughly ten times larger, demonstrating that hybrid architectures can balance accuracy and efficiency for tabular foundation models.
By Mieszko Komisarczyk, Saurabh Mathur, Maurice Kraus, Sriraam Natarajan, Kristian Kersting