arXiv Machine Learning By Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo

Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models into Efficient Predictors

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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.

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