Papers › Transformers with Stochastic Competition for Tabular Data Modelling

Transformers with Stochastic Competition for Tabular Data Modelling

18 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.13238archive 2025-07-28

Andreas Voskou, Charalambos Christoforou, Sotirios Chatzis

Despite the prevalence and significance of tabular data across numerous industries and fields, it has been relatively underexplored in the realm of deep learning. Even today, neural networks are often overshadowed by techniques such as gradient boosted decision trees (GBDT). However, recent models are beginning to close this gap, outperforming GBDT in various setups and garnering increased attention in the field. Inspired by this development, we introduce a novel stochastic deep learning model specifically designed for tabular data. The foundation of this model is a Transformer-based architecture, carefully adapted to cater to the unique properties of tabular data through strategic architectural modifications and leveraging two forms of stochastic competition. First, we employ stochastic "Local Winner Takes All" units to promote generalization capacity through stochasticity and sparsity. Second, we introduce a novel embedding layer that selects among alternative linear embedding layers through a mechanism of stochastic competition. The effectiveness of the model is validated on a variety of widely-used, publicly available datasets. We demonstrate that, through the incorporation of these elements, our model yields high performance and marks a significant advancement in the application of deep learning to tabular data.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Deep Learningtabular-classificationtabular-regression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections