arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Understanding the Surprising Generalization Properties of Tabular Foundation Models

The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table. It finds that a table’s usefulness is largely determined by its number of features rather than instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves downstream performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose that tabular in‑context generalization is primarily retrieval‑based, with models learning to identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.

By Nour Shaheen, Junwei Ma, Alex Labach, Frank Hutter, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Extractable Memorization From First Principles

arXiv:2607. 12649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on extractable memorization in LLMs suffers from two contrasting validity problems.

By A. Feder Cooper, Marika Swanberg, Jamie Hayes, Lea Duesterwald, Christopher De Sa, Daniel E. Ho, Mark A. Lemley, Percy Liang