Predictive modeling on web-scale tabular data with billions of instances and hundreds of heterogeneous numerical features faces significant scalability challenges. These features exhibit anisotropy, heavy-tailed distributions, and non-stationarity, creating bottlenecks for models like Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and requiring laborious manual feature engineering. We introduce KMLP, a hybrid deep architecture integrating a shallow Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) front-end with a Gated Multilayer Perceptron (gMLP) backbone. The KAN front-end uses learnable activation functions to automatically model complex non-linear transformations for each feature, while the gMLP backbone captures high-order interactions. Experiments on public benchmarks and an industrial dataset with billions of samples show KMLP achieves state-of-the-art performance, with advantages over baselines like GBDTs increasing at larger scales, validating KMLP as a scalable deep learning paradigm for large-scale web tabular data.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Overview of the KMLP-QTL structure. Tabular data features are first processed by QTL for fine-grained numerical representation. The data then flows through the KAN layer to manage feature heterogeneity and complex interactions, followed by stacked gMLP modules to capture deep non-linear interactions. Batch Normalization and Dropout are included in intermediate layers to enhance performance and stability.
Figure 2. Quantile Transformation with Linear interpolation
Dataset
#Train
#Valid
#Test
Tiny
200K
50K
1B
Small
2M
500K
1B
Medium
20M
5M
1B
Large
200M
50M
1B
Ultra Large
2B
50M
1B
Table 1. Statistical Information of the credit scoring dataset. It is a binary classification dataset. We prepared five training and validation sets with different data scales, while the test set is the same, with a proportion of 0.47% for overdues (label=1) in the test set.
Operator
CP
MT
CD
EG
HI
JA
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
CLR
69.18
28.68
93.35
72.15
85.16
55.18
81.84
48.74
80.03
44.49
87.03
58.66
Quantile
64.22
21.58
92.53
69.99
82.37
51.26
64.65
19.56
79.38
44.17
86.67
57.92
PLE
69.20
28.92
90.98
67.43
84.65
54.15
93.73
72.46
79.39
43.47
85.23
55.00
QTL
69.10
27.76
93.72
73.68
85.20
55.93
99.16
91.87
80.88
46.23
87.30
59.51
Table 2. Comparsion of different numerical preprocessing operators in open public datasets. We highlight the best results in bold. QTL achieved the best performance on 5 out of 6 datasets.
Model
KMLP
LightGBM
Training Resources
8 A100 GPUs
10,000 CPUs
Training Time
10 hours
24 hours
Inference Time
2 hours
2 hours
Table 3. Comparison of Model Training and Inference.We conducted a comparison of model training and inference in terms of time and resource consumption. The training was performed on a large-scale dataset (200M), while the inference was executed on an ultra-large test set (1B Test).
Operator
Valid
Test
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
CLR
95.11
76.34
94.91
75.60
Quantile
95.05
76.51
94.96
75.82
PLE
94.66
75.89
94.73
75.45
QTL
95.20
76.82
95.04
76.08
Table 4. Comparison of different numerical preprocessing operators on the medium-scale financial data.
Methods
Valid
Test
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
LightGBM
95.10
76.16
94.93
75.63
MLP
94.87
75.53
94.71
75.04
gMLP
94.99
75.99
94.86
75.41
KAN
93.15
73.26
93.99
72.86
SAINT
94.79
75.73
94.64
75.24
Table 5. Experimental results on Medium Scale Financial Data. We highlight the best results in bold, and the second-best results with underscores.
Methods
CP
MT
CD
EG
HI
JA
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
AUC
KS
LightGBM
68.98
28.27
92.24
69.89
84.97
55.30
95.05
75.76
79.86
44.16
86.09
56.56
MLP
68.41
27.93
93.59
72.64
84.94
54.88
99.4
93.38
79.71
44.00
86.27
57.22
gMLP
68.23
27.19
93.35
72.66
84.75
54.99
99.56
95.06
79.44
43.69
85.62
56.37
KAN
67.39
25.82
92.10
68.49
84.92
54.91
98.07
85.86
79.32
43.50
86.19
56.85
SAINT
67.41
26.71
92.10
69.37
84.35
53.82
98.95
91.2
78.36
41.78
85.3
55.05
Table 6. Experimental results on Open Public Datasets. Both AUC and KS metrics indicate that the higher the value, the stronger the model’s classification capability; we highlight the best results in bold, and the second best results with underscores.
Figure 3. Data Scale Effects. The KS (left) and AUC (right) of LightGBM and KMLP with different sizes of training sets. When the scale of the training data set is relatively small, LightGBM still performs better than KMLP. However, as the scale of the data set increases, KMLP outperformed LightGBM, achieving a 1.76 improvement in the KS value.
Model Variant
Average AUC
Average KS
AUC
KS
( Open Public Datasets)
(Open Public Datasets)
(Industrial Dataset)
(Industrial Dataset)
KMLP (FULL)
73.62
50.71
95.04
76.08
w.o. QTL
67.12 ( ↓ 6.50)
37.78 ( ↓ 12.93)
94.96 ( ↓ 0.08)
75.82 ( ↓ 0.26)
w.o. gMLP
73.19 ( ↓ 0.43)
50.01 ( ↓ 0.70)
94.71 ( ↓ 0.33)
75.04 ( ↓ 1.04)
w.o. KAN
72.99 ( ↓ 0.63)
49.99 ( ↓ 0.72)
94.86 ( ↓ 0.18)
75.41 ( ↓ 0.67)
Table 7. Ablation Study Performance. The results for the open public datasets are the average across six datasets. The values in parentheses indicate the performance drop compared to the full model, with a downward arrow ↓ representing the decrease.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Abbr
Name
#samples
#features
CP
Click_prediction_small
39948
9
MT
MagicTelescope
13376
10
CD
Credit
16714
10
EG
Eeg-eye-state
14980
14
HI
Higgs
98050
28
JA
Jannis
57580
54
Appendix
Table 8. Statistical Information of open public datasets.
Dataset
Link
CP
https://www.openml.org/d/43901
MT
https://www.openml.org/d/43971
CD
https://www.openml.org/d/45024
EG
https://www.openml.org/d/1471
HI
https://www.openml.org/d/42769
JA
https://www.openml.org/d/41168
Appendix
Table 9. The source of the open public datasets.
Models
Parameter
Values
LightGBM
learning_rate
{0.1,0.01}
num_leaves
{32, 256,512}
subsample
{0.8,0.9,1.0}
colsample_bytree
{0.8, 1.0}
min_child_samples
{10, 100}
#Iterations
{500,1000, 5000}
Appendix
Table 10. Hyperparameter Space. We use Grid Search to find the optimal parameters. Transfomer-model include FT-Transformer, TabNet and SAINT.
In deep learning for tabular data, efficient ensembles of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently emerged as effective and practical architectures. Existing methods of this kind use the same hyperparameters for all underlying MLPs, which requires hyperparameter tuning for achieving the best performance. In this work, we introduce TabPack, an efficient MLP ensemble with strong out-of-the-box performance and reduced reliance on traditional tuning. In a single run, TabPack samples and trains many MLPs with different hyperparameters efficiently in parallel and selects ensemble members on the fly during training. Thus, TabPack only requires specifying ranges from which to sample MLP hyperparameter rather than exact hyperparameter values, which naturally demands less precision for good performance. In experiments on medium-to-large public datasets, TabPack with default settings performs on par with extensively tuned prior methods, thus substantially reducing effort and compute resources needed to achieve competitive results on tabular tasks. Notably, running the default TabPack configuration on a modern MacBook took less time than tuning some baselines on an industry-grade GPU.
Tabular learning is still dominated by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs), while recent deep learning approaches have become increasingly competitive. However, applying deep tabular models to large-scale datasets remains challenging, as large sample sizes, high feature dimensionality, or many target classes can introduce substantial computational cost. We propose TabLoRA, a parameter-efficient trainable neural ensemble for large-scale tabular learning. Instead of using fully independent ensemble backbones, TabLoRA shares a common backbone across predictors and introduces predictor-specific low-rank adaptations, enabling ensemble-style prediction without full parameter duplication. Across benchmarks, TabLoRA achieves a favorable balance between predictive performance and practical efficiency compared with GBDT methods and recent deep learning baselines under the same resource constraints. Memory analysis and ablation studies further show that the proposed design improves the feasibility of neural ensemble learning while preserving much of the benefit of full ensembles.
Jiaqi Luo, Shixin Xu
School of Mathematical Sciences, Soochow University, No.1 Shizi Street, Suzhou, 215006, Jiangsu Province, China · Digital innovation research center, Duke Kunshan University, No.8 Duke Avenue, Kunshan, 215000, Jiangsu Province, China
We introduce Xiaomi-TabLDM, a tabular large data foundation model for classification and regression via in-context learning, which delivers superior prediction accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Pretrained exclusively on synthetic data generated from structural causal models (SCMs), our model enables more flexible context utilization and more efficient capacity scaling. i) A new performance standard. Strong regression performance across benchmarks: Xiaomi-TabLDM ranks 1st on OpenML-CTR23 and 2nd on regression across TALENT, TabArena, and BCCO, demonstrating consistently strong regression performance across four complementary benchmark suites. Favorable performance--efficiency trade-off: Xiaomi-TabLDM combines strong predictive performance with substantially lower computational cost. For example, on TabArena regression, it achieves the second-highest Elo while using 82% less training time and 68% less prediction time than the top-ranked TabFM. ii) Large-scale synthetic pretraining. Xiaomi-TabLDM expands the coverage and diversity of synthetic tabular data used for pretraining. We also adopt a three-stage training strategy together with dual-stream feature grouping, lightweight Attention Residual, and sparse Mixture-of-Experts, enabling Xiaomi-TabLDM to learn richer feature interactions and expert specialization across diverse tabular tasks. iii) Test-time scaling. Xiaomi-TabLDM further extends tabular prediction through test-time compute scaling, where allocating additional computation at inference time consistently improves predictive performance over the base model.