arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Lost in Aggregation: How Benchmarks Overlook Irreplaceable Model Strengths

The paper argues that typical tabular machine learning benchmarks, which aggregate results by averaging scores or ranks, can hide which models are essential for achieving the best performance on specific datasets. It proposes evaluating models against a data‑centric peak performance frontier, classifying them as irreplaceable, sufficient, redundant, or fallible based on their position relative to other models. Applying this to the TabArena benchmark shows that common aggregation metrics mainly capture consistency and failure avoidance, but fail to reflect dataset‑specific strengths, leading to a misalignment between aggregate rewards and true model utility.

By Andrej Tschalzev, Stefan L\"udtke, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Christian Bartelt
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond IID: How General Are Tabular Foundation Models, Really?

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
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

arXiv:2605. 23595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data.

By Trinh Pham, Viet Huynh, Hongzhi Yin, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Thanh Tam Nguyen