arXiv AI By He Zhao, Ryan Thompson, Daniel M. Steinberg, Ashfaqur Rahman, Edwin V. Bonilla, Cheng Soon Ong

From Synthetic Priors to Model Behavior: Structural Coverage in Tabular Foundation Models

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The paper investigates how synthetic pretraining priors used in tabular foundation models (TFMs) influence downstream performance. By reconstructing the synthetic data generators of four TFMs and comparing their generated tasks to two popular tabular benchmarks using structural descriptors, the authors measure structural coverage and normalized density. They find that some generators provide broader and denser support for benchmark tasks, and that stronger synthetic-to-benchmark support generally correlates with better model performance.

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