cs.LGApr 23, 2026

Towards Universal Tabular Embeddings: A Benchmark Across Data Tasks

Authors: Liane VogelKavitha SrinivasNiharika D'SouzaSola ShiraiOktie HassanzadehHorst Samulowitz

Organizations: Technical University of Darmstadt · IBM Research, USA

Abstract

Tabular foundation models aim to learn universal representations of tabular data that transfer across tasks and domains, enabling applications such as table retrieval, semantic search and table-based prediction. Despite the growing number of such models, it remains unclear which approach works best in practice, as existing methods are often evaluated under task-specific settings that make direct comparison difficult. To address this, we introduce TEmBed, the Tabular Embedding Test Bed, a unified benchmark for systematically evaluating tabular embeddings across four representation levels: cell, row, column, and table. Evaluating a diverse set of tabular representation learning models, we show that which model to use depends on the task and representation level. Our results offer practical guidance for selecting tabular embeddings in real-world applications and lay the groundwork for developing more general-purpose tabular representation models.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. TEmBed-T: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Table-Level Embeddings

    Jul 27, 2026Ayeen Poostforoushan, Liane Vogel, Carsten Binnig