cs.LGFeb 11, 2026

TabICLv2: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model

Authors: Jingang QuDavid HolzmüllerGaël VaroquauxMarine Le Morvan

Abstract

Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFNv2 and TabICL, have recently dethroned gradient-boosted trees at the top of predictive benchmarks, demonstrating the value of in-context learning for tabular data. We introduce TabICLv2, a new state-of-the-art foundation model for regression and classification built on three pillars: (1) a novel synthetic data generation engine designed for high pretraining diversity; (2) various architectural innovations, including a new scalable softmax in attention improving generalization to larger datasets without prohibitive long-sequence pretraining; and (3) optimized pretraining protocols, notably replacing AdamW with the Muon optimizer. On the TabArena and TALENT benchmarks, TabICLv2 without any tuning surpasses the performance of the current state of the art, RealTabPFN-2.5 (hyperparameter-tuned, ensembled, and fine-tuned on real data). With only moderate pretraining compute, TabICLv2 generalizes effectively to million-scale datasets under 50 GB GPU memory while being markedly faster than RealTabPFN-2.5. We provide extensive ablation studies to quantify these contributions and foster open research by releasing code for inference, pretraining, and synthetic data generation at https://github.com/soda-inria/tabicl.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. TabPFN-3.5: Technical Report

    Sep 15, 2026Benjamin Jäger, Nick Erickson, Léo Grinsztajn +44Tabular Foundation ModelsReal-Time Inference

  2. TabPFN-3: Technical Report

    May 13, 2026Léo Grinsztajn, Klemens Flöge, Oscar Key +38TabpfnBenchmark Datasets