arXiv:2607. 10077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular learning is still dominated by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs), while recent deep learning approaches have become increasingly competitive.
By Jiaqi Luo, Shixin Xu
arXiv:2606. 30410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry.
By Lennart Purucker, Andrej Tschalzev, Nick Erickson, Gioia Blayer, David Holzm\"uller, Alan Arazi, Alexander Pfefferle, Mustafa Tajjar, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Frank Hutter
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.
By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas
arXiv:2607. 05380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In deep learning for tabular data, efficient ensembles of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently emerged as effective and practical architectures.
By Yury Gorishniy, Akim Kotelnikov, Ivan Rubachev, Artem Babenko
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
The paper introduces In-Table Prediction (ITB), a self‑supervised task where deep neural networks learn to predict any column in a table from the remaining columns. It proposes a novel neural layer to handle missing continuous values, generates synthetic datasets with controlled column relationships, and evaluates three architectures—MLP, ResNet, and Transformer—showing that attention‑based Transformers perform best when ample training data and large embeddings are used. The study is limited to synthetic, small‑column tables and is presented as an initial investigation rather than a comprehensive real‑world analysis.
By Xiao Zhao, Daniela Oelke