The paper explores how to adapt tabular foundation models (TabFMs) for censored time‑to‑event prediction by linking them with CoxPH and DeepHit and revising training procedures. It evaluates zero‑shot, classification‑based fine‑tuning, and survival‑head adaptations across 74 single‑risk and 4 competing‑risk datasets, finding that zero‑shot works best on small datasets while supervised adaptation excels as data grows. The study shows that the choice of adaptation interface and data regime critically influences TabFM transfer performance.
By Minh-Khoi Pham, Luca Cotugno, Dan Cernei, Alina Sirbu, Stefano Masi, Giuseppe Prencipe, Alessandro Pingitore, Patrizia Landi, Working Group on Uric Acid, Cardiovascular Risk of the Italian Society of Hypertension, Tai Tan Mai, Martin Crane, Marija Bezbradica
arXiv:2601. 22259v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While tabular foundation models have achieved remarkable success in classification and regression, adapting them to model time-to-event outcomes for survival analysis is non-trivial due to right-censoring, where data observations may end before the event of interest occurs.
By Da In Kim, Wei Siang Lai, Kelly W. Zhang
arXiv:2606. 04564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs) have made rapid progress in standard classification and regression, but time-to-event survival prediction tasks have remained largely untouched.
By Samuel B\"ohm (Institute of Epidemiology and Prevention, Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany), Lennart Purucker (Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, PriorLabs, Freiburg, Germany), Frank Hutter (Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, PriorLabs, Freiburg, Germany), Pascal Schlosser (Institute of Epidemiology and Prevention, Medical Center - University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, US, CIBSS - Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany)
arXiv:2608. 12805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Access to clinical data is essential for developing reliable healthcare machine learning systems, but direct use of electronic health records is constrained by privacy regulation, institutional review, data-use agreements, and the risk of re-identification.
By Akanta Das, Al Amin Farhad, Mrinmoy Sarkar Anto, David Rehkopf, Ayin Vala, Tanmoy Sarkar Pias
arXiv:2607. 16802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep survival models are evaluated almost exclusively by the concordance index (C-index), yet they are commonly trained using likelihood objectives such as the Cox partial likelihood, discrete-time negative log-likelihood, and DeepHit likelihood.
By Meixu Chen, Kai Wang, Jing Wang
The paper introduces the General Demographic Pre-trained (GDP) model, a lightweight foundation model that learns representations from the two most common clinical attributes—age and sex. By optimizing encoding and visit‑reordering strategies, GDP embeddings are shown to improve predictive performance when concatenated with raw features across various disease and geographic cohorts. The model outperforms several state‑of‑the‑art tabular foundation models and tree‑based algorithms, demonstrating that enriched demographic embeddings can enhance classification tasks while remaining fully compatible with standard classifiers.
By Li-Chin Chen, Ji-Tian Sheu, Yuh-Jue Chuang