cs.DBJul 27, 2026

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

Authors: Ayeen Poostforoushan, Liane Vogel, Carsten Binnig

Organizations: Independent Researcher · Technical University of Darmstadt · Technical University of Darmstadt & DFKI & hessian.AI

Abstract

Tabular data is the dominant structured-data modality, and learning table representations has become a core research direction. Table-level embeddings in particular underpin a wide range of applications, including table retrieval, data lake discovery, and table classification. Despite their importance, there is still limited understanding of how different embedding approaches behave across tasks, making systematic evaluation and analysis essential. In this work, we introduce a systematic evaluation of table-level embeddings that captures several complementary properties required for downstream effectiveness. We realize this evaluation by extending TEmBed, a recently proposed testbed for tabular embeddings, whose table-level coverage is currently limited to a single retrieval task. An empirical study over the TEmBed model pool confirms that no single model excels across all tasks, demonstrating that table-level embedding quality cannot be reduced to retrieval alone.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Towards Universal Tabular Embeddings: A Benchmark Across Data Tasks

    Apr 23, 2026Liane Vogel, Kavitha Srinivas, Niharika D'Souza +3Tabular Learning