Tabular Regression

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Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Xiaomi-TabLDM: A Tabular Foundation Model Technical Report

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.

Xiaomi-TabLDM Team, :, Penghui Wang +10

Xiaomi

Synthetic Data Pretraining Tabular Foundation Models Test-Time Scaling Tabular ICL Tabular Regression

Sep 2, 2026cs.LG

Do Tabular Foundation Models Know Physics? Contamination, Units, and the Deterministic Limit

Tabular foundation models (TFMs) learn to fill in tables the way language models fill in text, and tables are arguably the format in which most physical measurement arrives. Did they learn any physics in the process? They are Bayesian by construction, so the question is what their prior contains. We probe it directly, evaluating four of them (TabPFN-3, TabICLv2, TabDPT and Real-TabPFN-2.5) against six baselines on datasets sampled from 316 physical equations, in and out of domain. TFMs dominate, out of the box and after tuning. But we show that their prior can represent neither a noiseless mechanism nor physical units, which is why they interpolate physics without yet being able to act as physical models.

Wassim Tenachi, Yashar Hezaveh, Laurence Perreault Levasseur +1

Département de physique, Université de Montréal · Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute · Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal[cs.LG]

Tabular Foundation Models Physical Reasoning Tabular Regression

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Context Window Failures in Relational Foundation Models

Recent Relational Deep Learning architectures have been proposed as foundation models for multi-table relational data, yet they impose constrained neighborhood budgets that force row truncation when an entity has many related records. We introduce Animus, a synthetic financial dataset in which predicting customer income requires aggregating up to tens of thousands of transactions. On the raw representation, three recently proposed models (RT, Griffin, RelGT) achieve

R^2 \le 0.18

; a single, routine, temporal pre-aggregation step recovers

R^2

up to

0.65

. This questions whether current relational foundation models are ready for high-cardinality real-world data.

Denis Oliveira Correa, Francisco Galuppo Azevedo

Kunumi Institute, Brazil · Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Relational Foundation Models Graph Foundation Models Relational Deep Learning Tabular Regression

Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

PATH: Next-Interval Prediction via Autoregressive Tree Hierarchy on Tabular Data

Interval prediction aims to achieve a target coverage level while producing intervals that are as short as possible. Many conformal regression pipelines first predict an uncertainty surrogate and then convert it into an interval through calibration or selection. This separation supports coverage calibration, but post hoc rules largely determine the final interval and do not fully use the learned output distribution. We observe that the resulting intervals have inherently hierarchical geometry: an interval can be recursively refined into nested subintervals, and binary trees naturally represent this structure. We formulate this hierarchy as next-interval prediction and propose PATH, which learns how probability mass flows from each interval to its next nested subintervals. PATH predicts a base leaf distribution and uses an autoregressive decoder to refine branch probabilities. Matching the distribution to the interval hierarchy aligns learning with extraction: PATH accumulates probability over adjacent output intervals and returns the shortest contiguous range reaching a selected mass. We compare PATH with 24 baselines for interval prediction on PATHBench, comprising 56 OpenML regression datasets. PATH substantially shortens the resulting intervals, achieving the lowest mean normalized length, 0.1473, while maintaining mean coverage of 0.9144. These results establish hierarchical output modeling as an effective approach for compact interval prediction on tabular data. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/pxcai/PATH.

Pengxiang Cai, Wanchen Lian, Chenyang Liu +4

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Ant Group

Regression Prediction Intervals Tabular Regression Autoregressive Modeling

Aug 6, 2026stat.ML

Handling Missing Data in Probabilistic Regression Trees

Probabilistic Regression Trees (PRTrees) are a smooth and consistent alternative to classical regression trees, producing continuous predictions through probabilistic split assignments. This paper extends the PRTree framework to accommodate missing predictor values directly during tree construction, eliminating the need for prior imputation. Three strategies are proposed, each exploiting the available information differently: a uniform-probability approach, a partial-observation approach, and a dimension-reduced smoothing approach. These modifications are defined to preserve the fundamental probabilistic properties of the original methodology, including probability conservation and marginal compatibility, under arbitrary patterns of missing covariate values. The proposed methods are evaluated on several real-world datasets exhibiting different levels of missingness and are compared with classical regression trees. The results show that the effectiveness of probabilistic tree construction depends strongly on the treatment of missing observations. Across the considered datasets, the fill strategy emerged as the dominant modeling component, often exerting a larger influence on predictive performance than either the smoothing distribution or the proxy-selection criterion. In datasets where a substantial proportion of observations contained missing predictor values, the proposed methods frequently outperformed CART, while maintaining the interpretability and flexibility of tree-based models.

Taiane Schaedler Prass, Alisson Silva Neimaier, Guilherme Pumi

a Graduate Program in Statistics - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Learning with Missing Data Decision Tree Learning Tabular Regression

Aug 1, 2026cs.LG

From field-scale to large-scale spectral libraries: Tabular foundation models in soil spectroscopy

Visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy enable rapid, cost-effective prediction of soil properties. Yet, translating high-dimensional, highly collinear spectra into accurate soil property predictions remains challenging, particularly when employing machine learning. We systematically investigated regression models and dimensionality reduction approaches for spectroscopic modeling across 85 regression tasks from open benchmark datasets in pedometrics spanning field-scale digital soil mapping and a global soil spectral library. We compared an in-context learning tabular foundation model (TabPFN), a convolutional neural network (CNN), rule-based regression (Cubist), Random Forest, and partial least squares regression (PLSR) using full spectra as well as features derived from principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) latent variables. TabPFN consistently delivered the best overall performance across scales, including large spectral library tasks with tens of thousands of soil samples. Notably, TabPFN applied directly to full spectra already surpassed all classical baselines, showing that explicit dimensionality reduction is not strictly required for strong performance. Further improvements were achieved through PLS, which proved to be an effective dimensionality reduction strategy for all models. Combining PLS latent variables with TabPFN yielded the best predictions overall. Our findings provide evidence-based guidance for spectroscopic calibration model selection across operational scales, demonstrating that the long-standing advantages of PLSR and modern tabular foundation models complement each other in chemometrics.

Viacheslav Barkov, Jonas Schmidinger, Robin Gebbers +1

Osnabrück University, Joint Lab Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Osnabrück, Germany · Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB), Department of Agromechatronics, Potsdam, Germany · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Cooperative and Autonomous Systems (CAS), Osnabrück, Germany

Tabular Foundation Models Recursive Least Squares Tabular Regression

Jul 30, 2026stat.ML

Conditioning Tree-Based Diffusions and Flows for Probabilistic Tabular Regression

Tree-based diffusion models fit flexible conditional predictive distributions for tabular regression without a neural density estimator, but they inherit their design defaults---noising path, parameterization, training distribution, features, sampler---from the neural setting. We show these defaults are the binding constraint: what a gradient-boosted ensemble actually solves is a supervised regression problem whose conditioning they determine. We present DiffGBM, which makes them explicit along two axes. First, a Gaussian-path flow-matching trainer for

p(y \mid x)

that learns a velocity field directly and recovers the score algebraically, admitting few-step deterministic ODE sampling. Second, we expose the score-side recipe---residualization, EDM-style preconditioning, log-sigma time sampling, noise-level features, loss weighting, and histogram resolution---as jointly tunable axes over a shared LightGBM surface rather than one frozen bundle. This \emph{score-flex} space represents the published recipe as a special case; across eleven tabular benchmarks under fold-0 tuning, folds-1--5 evaluation, and a matched 40-trial budget and sampler, the selected configurations beat that baseline on \emph{every} dataset (paired Wilcoxon

11/0

,

p<10^{-3}

), with the best aggregate CRPS skill (0.725 vs.\ 0.699) of any row. The two rows are complementary: score-flex buys accuracy with a stochastic sampler and is the slowest row, while flow matching is the cheapest sampler (

5.2\times

faster than the published baseline) and the best-calibrated DiffGBM row. Tuned non-diffusion baselines still win individual datasets, and stochastic (

\varepsilon>0

) flow samplers do not Pareto-dominate the deterministic corner.

Silas Koemen

Independent Researcher

Flow Matching Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees Tabular Diffusion Models Diffusion Sampling Score-Based Generative Modeling Diffusion Models+1

Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

Interpretable Fuzzy Rule-Based Regression Extension for Ex-Fuzzy Library

Machine learning models achieve high predictive accuracy in regression tasks, but their deployment in safety-critical and regulated domains requires interpretability. While fuzzy rule-based systems offer transparent, linguistically explicit interpretable models, Mamdani-style fuzzy regression remains underrepresented in modern machine learning software libraries. This paper presents an interpretable regression extension for the Ex-Fuzzy library, enabling Mamdani fuzzy inference with scalar consequents learned directly from data. For this, a target-aware partition initialisation strategy based on Fuzzy C-Means clustering is introduced, in which linguistic variables are derived from an augmented input-output space to emphasise output-relevant regions of the feature space. The proposed extension is evaluated on ten regression datasets from the KEEL repository, comparing Gaussian and trapezoidal partition strategies against standard baselines including linear regression, multilayer perceptron, and random forests. Experimental results show that Gaussian partitions consistently outperform uniform trapezoidal partitions, achieving a mean coefficient of determination of approximately 0.86 while producing compact rule bases of 10-15 human-readable rules. The proposed implementation provides a transparent and competitive alternative to black-box regression models, supporting practical interpretability with competitive predictive performance.

Cayan Deniz Kucuktopana, Javier Fumanal-Idocin, Richard Pitts +1

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering University of Essex Colchester, United Kingdom

Interpretable ML Fuzzy Logic Tabular Regression

Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Accelerometry-Derived Digital Biomarkers for Cardiometabolic Risk: A Population-Representative Tabular Benchmark with Uncertainty Quantification

Structured tabular data dominates clinical medicine, yet existing benchmarks fail to reflect real-world properties like complex survey sampling, demographic oversampling, and subgroup fairness. We introduce the NHANES Accelerometry Cardiometabolic Benchmark, derived from NHANES 2003-2006, comprising 1,381 adults with hip-worn accelerometry, fasting laboratory biomarkers, dietary intake, and anthropometrics. We evaluate three tabular learning methods -- ridge regression, XGBoost, and the foundation model TabPFN v2 -- to predict glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), fasting triglycerides, and C-reactive protein (CRP) from activity phenotypes and lifestyle covariates. TabPFN v2 achieves the best overall performance (HbA1c R^2=0.156, CRP R^2=0.383), while triglycerides remain largely unpredictable (R^2 < 0.05), consistent with known genetic dominance. We apply split conformal prediction to generate distribution-free 90% prediction intervals and evaluate demographic coverage equity across sex and race/ethnicity subgroups. Marginal coverage aligns with the 90% target for CRP and HbA1c but falls below for triglycerides. At the subgroup level, we observe localized undercoverage (e.g., HbA1c for Mexican American participants), illustrating the gap between marginal guarantees and the conditional coverage required for clinical fairness. Code and data are at https://github.com/felizzi/nhanes-accel-cardiometabolic-benchmark.

Federico Felizzi

SIIAM, Rome, Italy · enGene Statistics, Basel, Switzerland.

Algorithmic Fairness Wearable Health Monitoring Clinical Risk Prediction Regression Prediction Intervals Tabular Regression

Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

Counterfactual Residual Data Augmentation for Regression

Data-driven modeling in real-world regression tasks often suffers from limited training samples, high collection costs, and noisy observations. Inspired by the impact of data augmentation in vision and language, we propose a novel Counterfactual Residual Data Augmentation (CRDA) technique for tabular regression. Our key insight is that once a regressor has modeled the systematic component of the data, the remaining noise can be viewed as an invariant residual that remains stable under small perturbations of carefully selected features. We exploit this residual invariance to generate new, yet realistic, training samples, effectively expanding the dataset without requiring additional real data. Our method is model-agnostic and readily applicable to various types of regressors. In experiments across datasets from a variety of benchmark repositories, on average, CRDA reduces an MLP Regressor's MSE by 22.9% and an XGBoost Regressor's MSE by 6.4%. When compared to existing state-of-the-art data generators and augmentation techniques, CRDA consistently outperforms in MSE reduction. By adding principled counterfactual variations to the training data, our method offers a simple and efficient remedy for noise-prone, small-sample regression settings.

Hossein Mohebbi, Oliver Schulte, Ke Li +1

University of Waterloo · Vector Institute · Simon Fraser University.

Synthetic Tabular Data Generation Counterfactual Data Augmentation Tabular Regression

Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Solve for the Hyperparameter, Skip the Search: Kolmogorov-Optimal Scaling Laws for Spline Regression

Hyperparameter tuning almost always means search: fit the model at every value on a grid, score each by cross-validation, and keep the winner. For spline regression that search is unnecessary. The optimal resolution can be solved for in closed form, to the accuracy an exhaustive search reaches, at a fraction of the compute. Three ingredients make this possible: classical approximation theory pins the squared bias to a known power of the resolution G, exactly the Kolmogorov n-width of the smoothness class; the basis dimension is an explicit polynomial in G; and leave-one-out error follows from a single fit via the PRESS identity. Balancing the two known curves gives the minimizer analytically. We extend this calculus to many coordinates by replacing ambient input dimension with interaction order, the number of active low-order components in an ANOVA decomposition, yielding a scaling law in which the optimal resolution and error are power functions of the effective density (sample size per active component), with input dimension absent from the exponent. The law becomes an algorithm. KORE (Kolmogorov-optimal Order-aware Resolution Estimation) fits two pilot resolutions, solves a leverage-calibrated 2x2 system for the bias and noise scales, and evaluates the closed-form plug-in resolution with a tiny leave-one-out certificate: about a dozen fits instead of a full grid sweep, with a consistency guarantee as the sample grows. Across additive and sparse pairwise targets up to 80 input dimensions, KORE matches exhaustive 3-fold cross-validation and the full classical ladder (GCV, Mallows' Cp, AIC, BIC) while fitting roughly 8x fewer models; on 36 real tabular datasets it ranks first among 21 methods in accuracy per unit of compute, ahead of tuned boosters and kernel machines. When complexity lives in low interaction order, solving for the resolution beats searching for it.

Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick

PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Model Selection Scaling Laws Statistical Learning Theory Hyperparameter Optimization Tabular Regression

Jun 13, 2026cs.LG

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

Aina Vila Pons, Ioannis Tzachristas, Constantinos Antoniou

Chair of Transportation Systems Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Germany · BMW Group, Munich, Germany

Tabular Prediction Tabular Regression

Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

CLARITree: Cholesky and Lookahead Accelerations for Regression with Interpretable Piecewise Linear Trees

Regression trees are among the most interpretable yet expressive model classes in machine learning. Historically, greedy induction has been the dominant approach for constructing well-performing regression trees. While optimal methods based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound exist, they are computationally prohibitive for general linear regression trees, despite often achieving substantially better performance than greedy approaches. Recent work has shown that specialized lookahead strategies can dramatically improve runtime while maintaining near-optimal performance, primarily in classification settings. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm for near-optimal, sparse, piecewise linear regression trees that combines a lookahead-style search strategy with efficient rank-one Cholesky updates of the Gram matrix. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that our method achieves a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency, predictive accuracy, and sparsity, and scales significantly better than the current state of the art.

Yixiao Wang, Hayden McTavish, Varun Babbar +2

Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, USA · Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Tree Search Interpretable ML Tabular Regression

Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

RowNet: A Memory Transformer for Tabular Regression

Real estate valuation is a structured regression problem in which prices are governed by heterogeneous feature types, sparse regional effects, nonlinear interactions, and the practical logic of comparable properties. Standard multilayer perceptrons treat each row as an isolated vector and must learn locality, scale sensitivity, and categorical matching from supervision alone. Gradient-boosted decision trees provide strong tabular baselines, but their feature-centric splitting mechanism does not explicitly model the retrieval of similar historical observations. This paper presents RowNet, a retrieval-based neural architecture for real estate price-per-square-meter prediction. RowNet represents a query property through pairwise similarity features against a memory bank of labeled properties. A first retrieval layer estimates a coarse target from feature-only similarities. A second layer augments the memory comparison with target-consistency features and uses multiple learned attention heads to retrieve complementary comparable sets. A final mixture-of-experts module combines learned gating, residual correction, entropy regularization, and head-diversity regularization to produce the prediction.

Askat Rakhymbekov, Gulshat Muhametjanova

Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan · Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics2026 Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University Bishkek, KyrgyzstanJun

Memory-Augmented Neural Networks Tabular Regression

May 31, 2026stat.ML

On the Uncertainty Quantification Ability of Tabular Foundation Models

Foundation models (FMs) have achieved substantial success in generalizing across tasks without problemspecific training or fine-tuning. However, many critical applications in mechanics and computational science require not only accurate predictions but also reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ). Herein we investigate the UQ capabilities of tabular FMs in regression tasks through a comprehensive empirical study comparing Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Networks (TabPFN) against Gaussian processes (GPs). We systematically evaluate these two methods across a host of regression problems with varying complexity, dataset sizes, and input dimensionalities. We use a default setting to build all the GPs and for a fair comparison against TabPFN v2.5. Our findings highlight an important trade-off between explicit and learned priors: while TabPFN achieves highly competitive performance for complex, high-dimensional problems with sufficient data, GPs often provide superior predictive accuracy and UQ in data-scarce settings. Moreover, when the chosen kernel constitutes a good prior for the underlying function, GP performance can substantially exceed that of TabPFN. Our results can be reproduced from https://github.com/kianswarehouse/GPvsPFN.

Tyler R. Johnson, Kian Ben-Jacob, Nima Negarandeh +2

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine

Tabular Foundation Models Uncertainty Quantification Prior-Data Fitted Networks Tabular Regression Gaussian Process Regression

May 22, 2026cs.LG

Hinge Regression Trees and HRT-Boost: Newton-Optimized Oblique Learning for Compact Tabular Models

Learning high-quality oblique decision trees remains a significant challenge due to the discrete and non-convex nature of split optimization. We present the Hinge Regression Tree (HRT) framework, which reframes each oblique split as a nonlinear least-squares problem over two linear predictors whose max/min envelope induces ReLU-like representation capacity. We show that the resulting node-level optimization can be interpreted as a damped Newton method, and we establish the monotonic decrease of the node objective for its backtracking line-search variant. We establish, theoretically, that HRT is a universal approximator with an explicit

O(δ^2)

approximation rate. Building upon this base learner, we propose HRT-Boost, a mathematically synergistic ensemble extension that couples node-level Newton updates with stage-wise functional gradient descent. We show that this ensemble construction admits a stage-wise empirical risk reduction guarantee under the squared loss. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that HRT is highly competitive with established single-tree baselines, and HRT-Boost compares favorably with strong ensemble baselines and often yields substantially more compact models. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hongyi-Li-sz/HRT-Boost.

Hongyi Li, Jun Xu, Hong Yan

School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China and with the Shenzhen Key Lab for Advanced Motion Control and Modern Automation Equipments, Shenzhen, 518055, China · Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees Decision Tree Learning Tabular Regression

May 20, 2026cs.LG

Tabular foundation models for robust calibration of near-infrared chemical sensing data

Near-infrared spectroscopy is increasingly used as a rapid, non-destructive chemical sensing technology for the analysis of food, pharmaceutical, biological, and environmental samples. However, the practical deployment of NIR sensors still depends on calibration models able to handle high-dimensional, collinear spectra, limited sample sizes, preprocessing dependence, spectral outliers, and extrapolation beyond the calibration domain. Here, we evaluate whether tabular foundation models can provide a new calibration strategy for NIR chemical sensing. We benchmark TabPFN on 66 NIR datasets covering 54 regression and 12 classification tasks, and compare direct inference on raw spectra with preprocessing-optimized inference against PLS/PLS-DA, Ridge, Catboost, and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks. The study uses a unified validation framework in which preprocessing and model selection are performed exclusively on calibration data before external test evaluation. In regression, preprocessing-optimized TabPFN achieves the best overall average rank and significantly outperforms PLS, CatBoost, TabPFN on raw spectra, and CNN-1D, while remaining statistically comparable to Ridge. In classification, TabPFN applied directly to raw spectra provides the best average rank, with performance close to the optimized variant. Robustness analyses show that TabPFN provides strong average predictive performance but that its advantage decreases on spectral outliers and extrapolated samples, where classical chemometric models remain competitive. These results suggest that tabular foundation models can complement established chemometric workflows for NIR chemical sensing, especially in small- to medium-sized calibration settings, while highlighting the need for spectroscopy-specific priors and uncertainty-aware deployment strategies.

Robin Reiter, Denis Cornet, Fabien Michel +2

1CIRAD, UMR AGAP Institut, F-34398 Montpellier, France · 2UMR AGAP Institut, Université de Montpellier, CIRAD, INRAE, Institut Agro, Montpellier, France · 3LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France

Tabular Foundation Models Tabular Regression

May 18, 2026cs.LG

TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction

We present TabH2O, a foundation model for tabular data that performs classification and regression in a single forward pass via in-context learning. TabH2O builds on the TabICL architecture with several key modifications: (1) unified training, a single model handles both classification and regression via a dual-head architecture, eliminating the need for separate models and reducing total pretraining cost; (2) single-stage pretraining, training stability improvements (bounded scalable softmax, inter-stage normalization, learnable residual scaling, logit soft-capping) eliminate the need for multi-stage curriculum learning, enabling training with full-length sequences from the start; and (3) noise-aware pretraining, synthetic datasets include explicit noise dimensions to teach the model robustness to irrelevant features. We evaluate TabH2O v1 (29.2M parameters) on the TALENT benchmark (300 datasets), where it achieves an average rank of 2.55 out of 6 evaluated methods, outperforming tuned CatBoost (4.07), H2O AutoML (4.18), and LightGBM (5.08), competitive with TabPFN v2.6 (2.74), and behind TabICL v2 (2.12), while placing in the top-3 on 81% of the testing datasets across classification and regression tasks.

Pascal Pfeiffer, Dmitry Gordeev, Mathias Müller +6

Tabular Foundation Models Tabular Classification Tabular ICL Tabular Regression

May 9, 2026cs.LG

Optimised Support Vector Regression for California Housing Price Prediction: The Critical Role of Feature Engineering and Hyperparameter Tuning

In the recent literature, Support Vector Regression (SVR) has been cited as one of the weakest performers on the California Housing benchmark dataset, with Preethi et al. (2025)specifically ranking it last among the algorithms they tested, reporting an R2 of only 0.60. This paper examines whether the previously reported performance reflects experimental configuration choices rather than an inherent algorithmic limitation. A structured experimental workflow is applied: ten domain-motivated derived features are constructed from the eight raw inputs, an exploratory ensemble feature importance analysis identifies the most predictive candidates, and a randomised search over hyperparameter combinations with three-fold cross-validation selects the optimal SVR configuration within a leakage-safe scikit-learn Pipeline. A formal four-stage ablation study isolates the contribution of each component: scaling alone accounts for +0.744 in R2 (from -0.054 to 0.690), feature engineering adds +0.026 (to 0.716), and hyperparameter tuning contributes +0.008 (to 0.723). The resulting tuned SVR achieves a test R2 of 0.723, a 0.123-point absolute improvement over the previously reported SVR result (from 0.60 to 0.723, approximately 20% relative gain). In the ten-model comparison, the tuned SVR ranks fourth with R2 = 0.723, below XGBoost (0.832), Random Forest (0.814) and Gradient Boosting (0.783), while substantially outperforming simpler baselines. Ten-fold cross-validation yields a mean R2 of 0.703 (95% CI: [0.630, 0.775]), confirming robust generalisation. The observed improvement from R2 = 0.60 to R2 = 0.723 is associated primarily with proper feature scaling within a unified preprocessing pipeline, with domain-motivated feature engineering and systematic hyperparameter tuning, providing further incremental gains.

Emmanuel Adutwum

Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California, United States.

Support Vector Machines Hyperparameter Optimization Tabular Regression

May 5, 2026cs.AI

Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearch

Agentic data science (ADS) systems are rapidly improving their capability to autonomously analyze, fit, and interpret data, potentially moving towards a future where agents conduct the vast majority of data-science work. However, current ADS systems use statistical tools designed to be interpretable by humans, rather than interpretable by agents. To address this, we introduce Agentic-imodels, an agentic autoresearch loop that evolves data-science tools designed to be interpretable by agents. Specifically, it develops a library of scikit-learn-compatible regressors for tabular data that are optimized for both predictive performance and a novel LLM-based interpretability metric. The metric measures a suite of LLM-graded tests that probe whether a fitted model's string representation is "simulatable" by an LLM, i.e. whether the LLM can answer questions about the model's behavior by reading its string output alone. We find that the evolved models jointly improve predictive performance and agent-facing interpretability, generalizing to new datasets and new interpretability tests. Furthermore, these evolved models improve downstream end-to-end ADS, increasing performance for Copilot CLI, Claude Code, and Codex on the BLADE benchmark by up to 73%

Chandan Singh, Yan Shuo Tan, Weijia Xu +4

Microsoft Research · National University of Singapore

Interpretable ML Automated Machine Learning Tabular Regression Data Analysis Agents

Mar 9, 2026cs.LG

Distributional Regression with Tabular Foundation Models: Evaluating Probabilistic Predictions via Proper Scoring Rules

Modern tabular foundation models such as TabPFN and TabICL naturally produce full predictive distributions, while the benchmarks used to evaluate them (TabArena, TALENT, and others) still rely almost exclusively on point-estimate metrics (RMSE,

R^2

). This mismatch implicitly rewards machine learning models or pipelines that elicit a good conditional mean while ignoring the quality of the predictive distribution. We make the case for using proper scoring rules for training, fine-tuning, and benchmarking (ranking) of tabular foundation models. Although all strictly proper scoring rules are theoretically equivalent at the population level, they may differ on finite data: We demonstrate analytically and empirically that different scoring rules can induce different inductive biases during finite-sample optimization, leading to different model performance. We validate this finding by running fine-tuning experiments with TabPFN and TabICL using different scoring rules for various data sets, revealing non-trivial interactions between training objectives and evaluation metrics. Our results show that practitioners can adapt tabular foundation models to task-specific scoring objectives, and that the choice of scoring rule can influence model behavior in practice.

Jonas Landsgesell, Pascal Knoll, Tizian Wenzel

University of Stuttgart (Stuttgart, Germany) · Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Munich, Germany) · Munich Center for Machine Learning (Munich, Germany)

Tabular Foundation Models Proper Scoring Rules Tabular Regression

May 29, 2025cs.LG

Learning Interpretable Differentiable Logic Networks for Tabular Regression

Neural networks (NNs) achieve outstanding performance in many domains; however, their decision processes are often opaque and their inference can be computationally expensive in resource-constrained environments. We recently proposed Differentiable Logic Networks (DLNs) to address these issues for tabular classification based on relaxing discrete logic into a differentiable form, thereby enabling gradient-based learning of networks built from binary logic operations. DLNs offer interpretable reasoning and substantially lower inference cost. We extend the DLN framework to supervised tabular regression. We first redesign the final output layer (the SumLayer) to support continuous targets. More critically, we find the original two-phase training procedure used for classification is suboptimal for regression, and thus develop a unified, single-stage optimization procedure. We also demonstrate that temperature annealing of the network's differentiable relaxations is decisive for achieving stable convergence and high accuracy. We evaluate the resulting model on 15 public regression benchmarks, comparing it with modern neural networks and classical regression baselines. Regression DLNs match or exceed baseline accuracy while preserving interpretability and fast inference. Our results show that DLNs are a viable, cost-effective alternative for regression tasks, especially where model transparency and computational efficiency are important.

Chang Yue, Niraj K. Jha

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

Efficient Neural Network Inference Neural Network Interpretability Tabular Regression

May 1, 2025cs.LG

Predicting Estimated Times of Restoration for Electrical Outages Using Longitudinal Tabular Transformers

Utilities publish Estimated Times of Restoration (ETRs) for customer-facing storm outages, and their accuracy governs whether customers can make sound decisions about food, medical equipment, and relocation. Prior work treats ETR as static tabular regression in which each outage contributes one record, discarding the fact that every development of an outage, from crew assignment through dispatch, suspension, damage assessment and partial restoration, is recorded as a revision. We reformulate ETR prediction as longitudinal tabular regression and introduce a Longitudinal Tabular Transformer (LTT), an axial-attention model that consumes the revisions preceding a prediction and issues a refined estimate at every one. On 242{,}928 storm-attributed outages from a cohort of 526{,}468 filtered events and 10.0 million revisions at six operating companies, LTT reduces customer-weighted asymmetric error at all six, by a median of 36.9,% against the estimates the utilities published during the same storms and 11.3,% against the strongest learned baseline at each. It is the only method improving on the incumbent's satisfaction impact at all six companies while also reducing root mean squared error at all six. Stratification by revision index shows that LTT error is largest at the first revision, where no history is available, and falls monotonically as revisions accumulate.

Bogireddy Sai Prasanna Teja, Valliappan Muthukaruppan, Carls Benjamin

Exelon Corporation, Chicago, IL, USA

Event Time Prediction Transformer Tabular ML Tabular Regression Power Systems

Apr 13, 2025cs.LG

Ordinary Least Squares as an Attention Mechanism

I show that ordinary least squares (OLS) predictions can be rewritten as the output of a restricted attention module, akin to those forming the backbone of large language models. The connection comes from viewing OLS as a similarity-based prediction rule in a learned embedding space. In this representation, least squares does not estimate coefficients per se. Instead, it selects an embedding that minimizes squared prediction error by matching training and test vectors through inner products. This maps directly onto the query-key-value structure of attention mechanisms. I then discuss extensions to dimensionality reduction, nonlinearity, and time series econometrics. Monte Carlo simulations and real-data experiments on UCI/OpenML benchmarks show that nonlinear Attention Regression performs competitively against standard machine learning baselines. In the reverse direction, I replace the attention sublayer of a transformer for tabular data with an explicit regression on polynomial features. The resulting model performs comparably to the standard transformer at a fraction of its parameter count.

Philippe Goulet Coulombe

Département des Sciences Économiques, Université du Québec à Montréal

Transformer Attention Linear Regression Attention Mechanisms Tabular Regression