README.md

---
language:
- en
license: mit
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
task_categories:
- text-classification
- feature-extraction
- text-retrieval
tags:
- tabular
- embedding
- benchmark
- contrastive-learning
- retrieval
- classification
pretty_name: TabBench - Tabular Embedding Benchmark
---

<div align="center">

# TabBench: Tabular Embedding Benchmark

### A Comprehensive Evaluation Suite for Tabular Embedding Models

[![GitHub](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-TabEmbed-black)](https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed)

</div>

---

## Overview

**TabBench** is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the tabular understanding capability of embedding models. It assesses two critical dimensions of tabular representation: **linear separability** (via classification) and **semantic alignment** (via retrieval).

TabBench aggregates diverse datasets from four authoritative repositories and provides a standardized evaluation pipeline.

## Benchmark Statistics

| Category | Count | Samples / Corpus |
|:---|---:|---:|
| **Classification** | | |
| Grinsztajn | 56 datasets | 521,889 |
| OpenML-CC18 | 66 datasets | 249,939 |
| OpenML-CTR23 | 34 datasets | 210,026 |
| UniPredict | 155 datasets | 386,618 |
| *Classification Total* | *311 datasets* | *1,368,472* |
| **Retrieval** | | |
| Corpus | — | 1,394,247 |
| Numeric Queries | 10,000 | — |
| Categorical Queries | 10,000 | — |
| Mixed Queries | 10,000 | — |
| *Retrieval Total* | *30,000 queries* | *1,394,247* |

## Data Format

### Serialization

All tabular rows are serialized into natural language using the template:

```
The {column_name} is {value}. The {column_name} is {value}. ...
```

For example:
```
The age is 25. The occupation is Engineer. The salary is 75000.50. The city is New York.
```

### Classification Task

Each dataset directory contains:
- `train.jsonl` / `test.jsonl`: Each line is a JSON object with the following fields:
  - `text`: Serialized tabular row
  - `label`: Target label (string)
  - `dataset`: Dataset name
  - `benchmark`: Source benchmark name
  - `task_type`: Task type (`clf`)
- `train.csv` / `test.csv`: Original tabular data in CSV format
- `metadata.json`: Dataset metadata including `dataset`, `benchmark`, `sub_benchmark`, `task_type`, `data_type`, `target_column`, `label_values`, `num_labels`, `train_samples`, `test_samples`, `train_label_distribution`, `test_label_distribution`

```json
{"text": "The age is 36. The workclass is Private. The fnlwgt is 172256.0. ...", "label": ">50K", "dataset": "adult", "benchmark": "openml_cc18", "task_type": "clf"}
```

### Retrieval Task

The retrieval directory contains:
- `corpus.jsonl`: Global corpus of serialized rows (~1.4M documents), each with fields `idx`, `text`, `label`, `dataset`, `benchmark`
- `queries.jsonl`: All retrieval queries (30,000 total: 10k numeric + 10k categorical + 10k mixed)

Corpus format:
```json
{"idx": 0, "text": "The V1 is 3.0. The V2 is 559.0. ...", "label": "1.0", "dataset": "albert", "benchmark": "grinsztajn"}
```

Query format:
```json
{
  "task": "retrieval",
  "query_id": "retrieval_numeric_000001",
  "query_text": "find records where Easter is 0",
  "query_type": "numeric",
  "conditions": [{"field": "Easter", "operator": "==", "value": 0.0, "type": "numeric"}],
  "num_conditions": 1,
  "matching_indices": [1384050, 1384051, ...],
  "num_matches": 1822
}
```

## Evaluation Protocol

### Classification (Linear Probing)
1. Extract frozen embeddings for all samples using the target model
2. Train an independent Logistic Regression classifier per dataset (`max_iter=1000`, `random_state=42`)
3. Report **Accuracy** and **Macro-F1** on the test split

### Retrieval (Dense Retrieval)
1. Encode all corpus documents and queries
2. Build a Faiss `IndexFlatIP` index (cosine similarity via L2-normalized vectors)
3. Retrieve top-k documents for each query
4. Report **MRR@10** and **nDCG@10**

### Overall Score
The **Overall** metric is the macro-average of Accuracy, F1, MRR@10, and nDCG@10.

## Leaderboard

| Model | #Params | Overall | Accuracy | F1 | MRR@10 | nDCG@10 |
|:---|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| Jina-Embeddings-v3 | 0.6B | 41.48 | 60.33 | 46.11 | 32.49 | 26.98 |
| Jasper-Token-Compression | 0.6B | 42.75 | 61.25 | 47.69 | 33.56 | 28.50 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B | 0.6B | 44.92 | 62.81 | 50.32 | 36.00 | 30.56 |
| **TabEmbed-0.6B** | **0.6B** | **65.27** | **67.16** | **56.56** | **71.72** | **65.64** |
| F2LLM-4B | 4B | 48.02 | 64.92 | 52.48 | 40.60 | 34.08 |
| Octen-Embedding-4B | 4B | 48.62 | 65.36 | 53.64 | 40.97 | 34.51 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-4B | 4B | 48.91 | 65.09 | 52.72 | 42.04 | 35.76 |
| **TabEmbed-4B** | **4B** | **70.71** | **69.51** | **59.75** | **79.33** | **74.25** |
| SFR-Embedding-Mistral | 7B | 49.42 | 64.28 | 50.75 | 44.23 | 38.41 |
| Linq-Embed-Mistral | 7B | 50.74 | 66.06 | 53.33 | 44.65 | 38.92 |
| GTE-Qwen2-7B-Instruct | 7B | 51.27 | 64.67 | 51.76 | 47.44 | 41.19 |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 8B | 48.03 | 65.08 | 52.81 | 40.06 | 34.16 |
| **TabEmbed-8B** | **8B** | **71.62** | **69.88** | **60.19** | **80.58** | **75.83** |

## Quick Start

```bash
# Clone the evaluation code
git clone https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed.git
cd TabEmbed
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run evaluation
python src/run_benchmark.py \
    --benchmark_dir /path/to/TabBench \
    --model_name_or_path your-model-name \
    --output_dir results/ \
    --max_seq_length 1024 \
    --batch_size 64
```

## Source Datasets

TabBench is built upon the following high-quality data sources:
- [Grinsztajn et al. (2022)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08815) — Tree-based models benchmark
- [OpenML-CC18](https://www.openml.org/s/99) — OpenML curated classification benchmark
- [OpenML-CTR23](https://www.openml.org/s/336) — OpenML tabular regression benchmark
- [UniPredict](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03266) — Universal prediction benchmark

Raw evaluation data is sourced from [tabula-8b-eval-suite](https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlfoundations/tabula-8b-eval-suite).

## Citation

If you use TabBench in your research, please cite:

> Paper coming soon. Please check back later for the BibTeX citation.

## License

This benchmark is released under the [MIT License](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).

Note: The individual upstream datasets included in this benchmark may have their own respective licenses. Please refer to the original data sources for their specific terms.