arXiv AI By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas

Generalization Can Emerge in Tabular Foundation Models From a Single Table

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The paper demonstrates that a tabular foundation model can achieve strong generalization using only a single real table for self‑supervised pre‑training, challenging the belief that large synthetic or real datasets are necessary. By systematically pre‑training and evaluating across diverse benchmarks, the authors show that the number and quality of tasks that can be derived from a dataset are critical for downstream performance. This finding suggests that carefully constructed task sets from limited data can enable effective transfer learning in tabular models.

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