Papers › TabDPT: Scaling Tabular Foundation Models

TabDPT: Scaling Tabular Foundation Models

23 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.18164archive 2025-07-28

Junwei Ma, Valentin Thomas, Rasa Hosseinzadeh, Hamidreza Kamkari, Alex Labach, Jesse C. Cresswell, Keyvan Golestan, Guangwei Yu, Maksims Volkovs, Anthony L. Caterini

The challenges faced by neural networks on tabular data are well-documented and have hampered the progress of tabular foundation models. Techniques leveraging in-context learning (ICL) have shown promise here, allowing for dynamic adaptation to unseen data. ICL can provide predictions for entirely new datasets without further training or hyperparameter tuning, therefore providing very fast inference when encountering a novel task. However, scaling ICL for tabular data remains an issue: approaches based on large language models cannot efficiently process numeric tables, and tabular-specific techniques have not been able to effectively harness the power of real data to improve performance and generalization. We are able to overcome these challenges by training tabular-specific ICL-based architectures on real data with self-supervised learning and retrieval, combining the best of both worlds. Our resulting model -- the Tabular Discriminative Pre-trained Transformer (TabDPT) -- achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CC18 (classification) and CTR23 (regression) benchmarks with no task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating the adapatability and speed of ICL once the model is pre-trained. TabDPT also demonstrates strong scaling as both model size and amount of available data increase, pointing towards future improvements simply through the curation of larger tabular pre-training datasets and training larger models.

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maskmean layer6ai-labs/TabDPT/src/tabdpt/utils.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a627013811283b2d · report
distribution_mean layer6ai-labs/TabDPT/src/tabdpt/bar_distribution.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 6051412d84d99fb2 · report
distribution_median layer6ai-labs/TabDPT/src/tabdpt/bar_distribution.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 85854b5127e1e1d5 · report
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generate_random_permutation layer6ai-labs/TabDPT/src/tabdpt/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · acf2eab3a69c6bc4 · report

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In-Context LearningSelf-Supervised Learning

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSPEEDSoftmaxTransformer

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