SOMTab is a Set-Order Mamba architecture designed for efficient tabular in-context learning. It separates representation construction from query-conditioned retrieval, using Mamba-based state‑space mixing to build compact row and column representations while retaining attention for final prediction. The model, along with a synthetic prior called DCH‑TailMix, achieves performance comparable to Transformer‑based tabular foundation models but with faster inference and lower GPU memory usage.
By Hao Wang, Siyu Zhang, Wei Ma
arXiv:2606. 07345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, exemplified by TabPFN, perform prediction via in-context learning, inferring test labels directly from labeled training examples.
By Si-Yang Liu, Han-Jia Ye
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
The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table, rather than large synthetic or real datasets. It finds that a table’s usefulness for downstream tasks is mainly determined by the number of features, not instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose a task‑centric, retrieval‑based view of in‑context generalization, suggesting that effective TFMs identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
By Rasa Hosseinzadeh, Alex Labach, Zexin Xue, Shuyi Han, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
The paper introduces a reproducible benchmark for evaluating attention mechanisms in tabular foundation models, focusing on the distinct row and column attention patterns that differ from language model attention. It compares several backends—Torch SDPA, FlashAttention variants, vLLM, and SageAttention—across realistic tabular shapes on A100, H100, and B200 GPUs, revealing that optimal backend choice varies by attention type, hardware, and model specifics. The study finds FlashAttention generally performs best, but CuDNN can outperform it for column attention on longer sequences, while SageAttention excels for large row sequences beyond 16k rows.
By Maximilian Schambach, Clemens Biehl, Sam Thelin