Daily Papers

Weight tying reduces the parameter cost of language models, but the usual tied output head is limited to a single softmax. We introduce onóna, a two-table parameterization that increases output expressiveness while preserving input-output weight sharing. The Transformer takes the average of two embedding tables as input, and the output head combines the softmax distributions defined by those same tables. A gate conditioned only on the current input token determines the mixture weight. Its values can be precomputed for inference, and the Transformer body remains unchanged. We evaluate onóna across Dense, Gated DeltaNet hybrid, mixture-of-experts, and Attention Residual architectures at 142M, 330M, and 1B scales. Under matched token budgets, onóna lowers final validation loss and external perplexity in 11 of 12 comparisons and raises the average accuracy over eight downstream tasks in 10 of 12. The one exception on loss is the 1B MoE model. The cost is one extra embedding table and one extra vocabulary projection.

Sequential learning paradigms pose challenges for gradient-based deep learning due to difficulties incorporating new data and retaining prior knowledge. While Gaussian processes elegantly tackle these problems, they struggle with scalability and handling rich inputs, such as images. To address these issues, we introduce a technique that converts neural networks from weight space to function space, through a dual parameterization. Our parameterization offers: (i) a way to scale function-space methods to large data sets via sparsification, (ii) retention of prior knowledge when access to past data is limited, and (iii) a mechanism to incorporate new data without retraining. Our experiments demonstrate that we can retain knowledge in continual learning and incorporate new data efficiently. We further show its strengths in uncertainty quantification and guiding exploration in model-based RL. Further information and code is available on the project website.

Robust and effective scaling of models from small to large width typically requires the precise adjustment of many algorithmic and architectural details, such as parameterization and optimizer choices. In this work, we propose a new perspective on parameterization by investigating a key assumption in prior work about the alignment between parameters and data and derive new theoretical results under weaker assumptions and a broader set of optimizers. Our extensive empirical investigation includes tens of thousands of models trained with all combinations of three optimizers, four parameterizations, several alignment assumptions, more than a dozen learning rates, and fourteen model sizes up to 26.8B parameters. We find that the best learning rate scaling prescription would often have been excluded by the assumptions in prior work. Our results show that all parameterizations, not just maximal update parameterization (muP), can achieve hyperparameter transfer; moreover, our novel per-layer learning rate prescription for standard parameterization outperforms muP. Finally, we demonstrate that an overlooked aspect of parameterization, the epsilon parameter in Adam, must be scaled correctly to avoid gradient underflow and propose Adam-atan2, a new numerically stable, scale-invariant version of Adam that eliminates the epsilon hyperparameter entirely.

We present ModelTables, a benchmark of tables in Model Lakes that captures the structured semantics of performance and configuration tables often overlooked by text only retrieval. The corpus is built from Hugging Face model cards, GitHub READMEs, and referenced papers, linking each table to its surrounding model and publication context. Compared with open data lake tables, model tables are smaller yet exhibit denser inter table relationships, reflecting tightly coupled model and benchmark evolution. The current release covers over 60K models and 90K tables. To evaluate model and table relatedness, we construct a multi source ground truth using three complementary signals: (1) paper citation links, (2) explicit model card links and inheritance, and (3) shared training datasets. We present one extensive empirical use case for the benchmark which is table search. We compare canonical Data Lake search operators (unionable, joinable, keyword) and Information Retrieval baselines (dense, sparse, hybrid retrieval) on this benchmark. Union based semantic table retrieval attains 54.8 % P@1 overall (54.6 % on citation, 31.3 % on inheritance, 30.6 % on shared dataset signals); table based dense retrieval reaches 66.5 % P@1, and metadata hybrid retrieval achieves 54.1 %. This evaluation indicates clear room for developing better table search methods. By releasing ModelTables and its creation protocol, we provide the first large scale benchmark of structured data describing AI model. Our use case of table discovery in Model Lakes, provides intuition and evidence for developing more accurate semantic retrieval, structured comparison, and principled organization of structured model knowledge. Source code, data, and other artifacts have been made available at https://github.com/RJMillerLab/ModelTables.

Second-order optimization has been developed to accelerate the training of deep neural networks and it is being applied to increasingly larger-scale models. In this study, towards training on further larger scales, we identify a specific parameterization for second-order optimization that promotes feature learning in a stable manner even if the network width increases significantly. Inspired by a maximal update parameterization, we consider a one-step update of the gradient and reveal the appropriate scales of hyperparameters including random initialization, learning rates, and damping terms. Our approach covers two major second-order optimization algorithms, K-FAC and Shampoo, and we demonstrate that our parameterization achieves higher generalization performance in feature learning. In particular, it enables us to transfer the hyperparameters across models with different widths.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

Recent years have seen a growing interest and adoption of LLMs, with muTransfer becoming a key technique for tuning hyperparameters in large-scale training. Meanwhile, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a leading architecture in extremely large models. However, the intersection of these two advancements has remained unexplored. In this work, we derive a mu-Parameterization (muP) for MoE, providing theoretical guarantees for feature learning across model widths in both the router and experts. We empirically validate our parameterization and further investigate how scaling the number of experts and granularity affects the optimal learning rate.

This paper introduces a new parameterization of deep neural networks (both fully-connected and convolutional) with guaranteed ell^2 Lipschitz bounds, i.e. limited sensitivity to input perturbations. The Lipschitz guarantees are equivalent to the tightest-known bounds based on certification via a semidefinite program (SDP). We provide a ``direct'' parameterization, i.e., a smooth mapping from mathbb R^N onto the set of weights satisfying the SDP-based bound. Moreover, our parameterization is complete, i.e. a neural network satisfies the SDP bound if and only if it can be represented via our parameterization. This enables training using standard gradient methods, without any inner approximation or computationally intensive tasks (e.g. projections or barrier terms) for the SDP constraint. The new parameterization can equivalently be thought of as either a new layer type (the sandwich layer), or a novel parameterization of standard feedforward networks with parameter sharing between neighbouring layers. A comprehensive set of experiments on image classification shows that sandwich layers outperform previous approaches on both empirical and certified robust accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/acfr/LBDN.

Large artificial neural networks have become a mainstay of language, vision, and audio processing and synthesis, yet their initializations and learning rates are often set in an unsophisticated fashion, due to the high cost of hyperparameter sweeps at scale. The mu-Parameterization (muP) offers a potential solution to this challenge, yielding scaling rules for model initialization and learning rates while reportedly enabling zero-shot hyperparameter transfer from small to large models. Despite its evident promise, the muP method is not yet widely adopted, perhaps due to higher implementation complexity, many variations, or complex theoretical background. This work investigates muP empirically, focusing on the ubiquitous transformer architecture, and aims to answer a simple question: does mu-Transfer yield optimal learning rates in practice? Studying models of up to 10B parameters and training budgets of up to 190B tokens, we find mu-Transfer works as intended for the majority of important cases, yet also identify a few cases where it may not.

While fine-tuning pretrained models has become common practice, these models often underperform outside their specific domains. Recently developed model merging techniques enable the direct integration of multiple models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, into a single model. This strategy promotes multitasking capabilities without requiring retraining on the original datasets. However, existing methods fall short in addressing potential conflicts and complex correlations between tasks, especially in parameter-level adjustments, posing a challenge in effectively balancing parameter competition across various tasks. This paper introduces an innovative technique named PCB-Merging (Parameter Competition Balancing), a lightweight and training-free technique that adjusts the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging. PCB-Merging employs intra-balancing to gauge parameter significance within individual tasks and inter-balancing to assess parameter similarities across different tasks. Parameters with low importance scores are dropped, and the remaining ones are rescaled to form the final merged model. We assessed our approach in diverse merging scenarios, including cross-task, cross-domain, and cross-training configurations, as well as out-of-domain generalization. The experimental results reveal that our approach achieves substantial performance enhancements across multiple modalities, domains, model sizes, number of tasks, fine-tuning forms, and large language models, outperforming existing model merging methods. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/pcb-merging.

Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes a key bottleneck for end-to-end performance. We study an open-book setting where queries must be answered over large, heterogeneous table collections pooled from many sources, without clean scoping signals such as database identifiers. Here, dense retrieval (DR) achieves high recall but returns many distractors, while join-aware alternatives often rely on extra assumptions and/or incur high inference overhead. We propose CORE-T, a scalable, training-free framework that enriches tables with LLM-generated purpose metadata and pre-computes a lightweight table-compatibility cache. At inference time, DR returns top-K candidates; a single LLM call selects a coherent, joinable subset, and a two-step additive adjustment stage restores strongly compatible tables. Across Bird, Spider, MMQA, and Beaver, CORE-T improves over DR by up to 22.7 points in table-selection F1 while returning up to 40% fewer tables, and by up to 24.4 points in multi-table execution accuracy, and uses 1.64-4.20x fewer total selection tokens than LLM-intensive baselines.

Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing. This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes. As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics. To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs. Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks. From a delivery standpoint, we operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer. We conclude by presenting evaluations using 4DBInfer, the results of which highlight the importance of considering each such dimension in the design of RDB predictive models, as well as the limitations of more naive approaches such as simply joining adjacent tables. Our source code is released at https://github.com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark .

Recent advances in table understanding have focused on instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for table-related tasks. However, existing research has overlooked the impact of hyperparameter choices and lacks a comprehensive evaluation of the out-of-domain table understanding ability and the general capabilities of these table LLMs. In this paper, we evaluate these abilities in existing table LLMs, and reveal significant declines in both out-of-domain table understanding and general capabilities compared to their base models. Through systematic analysis, we show that hyperparameters, such as learning rate, can significantly influence both table-specific and general capabilities. Contrary to the existing table instruction-tuning works, we demonstrate that smaller learning rates and fewer training instances can enhance table understanding while preserving general capabilities. Based on our findings, we introduce TAMA, a TAble LLM instruction-tuned from LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct, which achieves performance on par with, or surpassing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on table tasks, while maintaining strong out-of-domain generalization and general capabilities. Our findings highlight the potential for reduced data annotation costs and more efficient model development through careful hyperparameter selection.

Automatic analysis of the enormous sets of images is a critical task in life sciences. This faces many challenges such as: algorithms are highly parameterized, significant human input is intertwined, and lacking a standard meta-visualization approach. This paper proposes an alternative iterative approach for optimizing input parameters, saving time by minimizing the user involvement, and allowing for understanding the workflow of algorithms and discovering new ones. The main focus is on developing an interactive visualization technique that enables users to analyze the relationships between sampled input parameters and corresponding output. This technique is implemented as a prototype called Veni Vidi Vici, or "I came, I saw, I conquered." This strategy is inspired by the mathematical formulas of numbering computable functions and is developed atop ImageJ, a scientific image processing program. A case study is presented to investigate the proposed framework. Finally, the paper explores some potential future issues in the application of the proposed approach in parameter space analysis in visualization.

Tables and table-based use cases play a crucial role in many important real-world applications, such as spreadsheets, databases, and computational notebooks, which traditionally require expert-level users like data engineers, data analysts, and database administrators to operate. Although LLMs have shown remarkable progress in working with tables (e.g., in spreadsheet and database copilot scenarios), comprehensive benchmarking of such capabilities remains limited. In contrast to an extensive and growing list of NLP benchmarks, evaluations of table-related tasks are scarce, and narrowly focus on tasks like NL-to-SQL and Table-QA, overlooking the broader spectrum of real-world tasks that professional users face. This gap limits our understanding and model progress in this important area. In this work, we introduce MMTU, a large-scale benchmark with over 30K questions across 25 real-world table tasks, designed to comprehensively evaluate models ability to understand, reason, and manipulate real tables at the expert-level. These tasks are drawn from decades' worth of computer science research on tabular data, with a focus on complex table tasks faced by professional users. We show that MMTU require a combination of skills -- including table understanding, reasoning, and coding -- that remain challenging for today's frontier models, where even frontier reasoning models like OpenAI o4-mini and DeepSeek R1 score only around 60%, suggesting significant room for improvement. We highlight key findings in our evaluation using MMTU and hope that this benchmark drives further advances in understanding and developing foundation models for structured data processing and analysis. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MMTU-Benchmark/MMTU and https://huggingface.co/datasets/MMTU-benchmark/MMTU.

When considering a model architecture, there are several ways to reduce its memory footprint. Historically, popular approaches included selecting smaller architectures and creating sparse networks through pruning. More recently, randomized parameter-sharing (RPS) methods have gained traction for model compression at start of training. In this paper, we comprehensively assess the trade-off between memory and accuracy across RPS, pruning techniques, and building smaller models. Our findings demonstrate that RPS, which is both data and model-agnostic, consistently outperforms/matches smaller models and all moderately informed pruning strategies, such as MAG, SNIP, SYNFLOW, and GRASP, across the entire compression range. This advantage becomes particularly pronounced in higher compression scenarios. Notably, even when compared to highly informed pruning techniques like Lottery Ticket Rewinding (LTR), RPS exhibits superior performance in high compression settings. This points out inherent capacity advantage that RPS enjoys over sparse models. Theoretically, we establish RPS as a superior technique in terms of memory-efficient representation when compared to pruning for linear models. This paper argues in favor of paradigm shift towards RPS based models. During our rigorous evaluation of RPS, we identified issues in the state-of-the-art RPS technique ROAST, specifically regarding stability (ROAST's sensitivity to initialization hyperparameters, often leading to divergence) and Pareto-continuity (ROAST's inability to recover the accuracy of the original model at zero compression). We provably address both of these issues. We refer to the modified RPS, which incorporates our improvements, as STABLE-RPS.

The cost of hyperparameter tuning in deep learning has been rising with model sizes, prompting practitioners to find new tuning methods using a proxy of smaller networks. One such proposal uses muP parameterized networks, where the optimal hyperparameters for small width networks transfer to networks with arbitrarily large width. However, in this scheme, hyperparameters do not transfer across depths. As a remedy, we study residual networks with a residual branch scale of 1/text{depth} in combination with the muP parameterization. We provide experiments demonstrating that residual architectures including convolutional ResNets and Vision Transformers trained with this parameterization exhibit transfer of optimal hyperparameters across width and depth on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Furthermore, our empirical findings are supported and motivated by theory. Using recent developments in the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) description of neural network learning dynamics, we show that this parameterization of ResNets admits a well-defined feature learning joint infinite-width and infinite-depth limit and show convergence of finite-size network dynamics towards this limit.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

The information in tables can be an important complement to text, making table-based question answering (QA) systems of great value. The intrinsic complexity of handling tables often adds an extra burden to both model design and data annotation. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple table-based QA model with minimal annotation effort. Motivated by the fact that table-based QA requires both alignment between questions and tables and the ability to perform complicated reasoning over multiple table elements, we propose an omnivorous pretraining approach that consumes both natural and synthetic data to endow models with these respective abilities. Specifically, given freely available tables, we leverage retrieval to pair them with relevant natural sentences for mask-based pretraining, and synthesize NL questions by converting SQL sampled from tables for pretraining with a QA loss. We perform extensive experiments in both few-shot and full settings, and the results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our model OmniTab, with the best multitasking approach achieving an absolute gain of 16.2% and 2.7% in 128-shot and full settings respectively, also establishing a new state-of-the-art on WikiTableQuestions. Detailed ablations and analyses reveal different characteristics of natural and synthetic data, shedding light on future directions in omnivorous pretraining. Code, pretraining data, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/OmniTab.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

The μ-parameterization (μP) provides a principled foundation for large language model (LLM) training by prescribing width-independent learning dynamics, which in turn enables predictable scaling behavior and robust hyperparameter transfer across model sizes. A central requirement of μP is the satisfaction of certain spectral conditions on weight matrices, which ensure consistent feature learning and optimization behavior as model width grows. While these conditions are well understood in theory, guaranteeing their validity in practical training for matrix-based optimizers such as Muon is still under studied. Existing works that study Muon under μP exhibit important limitations: they either do not ensure that the spectral conditions hold throughout the entire training horizon, or require repeated spectral normalization (or Newton-Schulz iterations) applied to both weights and updates, leading to significant computational overhead and reduced practicality. In this work, we show how to reliably guarantee the spectral conditions required by μP for Muon during the entire training process. Our key insight is that for moderately large models, maintaining spectral control at the level of optimizer updates alone is sufficient to preserve μP-compatible scaling, eliminating the need for explicit spectral normalization of the weights. Based on this principle, we develop a variant of Muon, namely Muon++, that satisfies spectral condition throughout the training process. Our results bridge the gap between the theoretical promises of μP and the practical deployment of matrix-based optimizers in long-horizon training. We also take the first step towards an adaptive spectral condition by incorporating data-dependent effects, making it better suited for long-horizon LLM training.

While tabular classification has traditionally relied on from-scratch training, a recent breakthrough called prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) challenges this approach. Similar to large language models, PFNs make use of pretraining and in-context learning to achieve strong performance on new tasks in a single forward pass. However, current PFNs have limitations that prohibit their widespread adoption. Notably, TabPFN achieves very strong performance on small tabular datasets but is not designed to make predictions for datasets of size larger than 1000. In this work, we overcome these limitations and substantially improve the performance of PFNs via context optimization. We introduce TuneTables, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy for PFNs that compresses large datasets into a smaller learned context. We conduct extensive experiments on 19 algorithms over 98 datasets and find that TuneTables achieves the best performance on average, outperforming boosted trees such as CatBoost, while optimizing fewer than 5% of TabPFN's parameters. Furthermore, we show that TuneTables can be used as an interpretability tool and can even be used to mitigate biases by optimizing a fairness objective. We open-source our code and raw results at https://github.com/penfever/TuneTables.

Many organizations rely on data from government and third-party sources, and those sources rarely follow the same data formatting. This introduces challenges in integrating data from multiple sources or aligning external sources with internal databases. Commercial database systems do not offer adequate support for integrating data from heterogeneous sources, and manual integration is both time-consuming and inefficient. State-of-the-art data integration approaches that rely on similarity functions and textual transformations often fail to handle challenging cases where multiple mappings are required, or the mappings go beyond simple textual transformations. In this paper, we study the potentials of deep neural models for transforming tables for joinability. In particular, we cast the problem as a prediction task and develop a framework that leverages large deep-learning language models to transform tabular data from a source formatting to a desired target representation. Our framework can efficiently learn the patterns for mapping a source formatting into an expected target using just a few examples, which can then be used for tasks such as table joining, filling in missing values, and error detection. Compared to state-of-the-art mapping and joining approaches, our framework delivers noticeably more accurate and scalable performance on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experimental evaluation also shows that the performance of the proposed framework using our fine-tuned model is at par or better than large language models such as GPT-3, despite the significant difference in size, and that using large language models within our framework improves their performance.

Complex reasoning over tabular data is crucial in real-world data analysis, yet large language models (LLMs) often underperform due to complex queries, noisy data, and limited numerical capabilities. To address these issues, we propose \method, a framework consisting of: (1) a query decomposer that breaks down complex questions, (2) a table sanitizer that cleans and filters noisy tables, and (3) a program-of-thoughts (PoT)-based reasoner that generates executable code to derive the final answer from the sanitized table. To ensure unbiased evaluation and mitigate data leakage, we introduce a new dataset, CalTab151, specifically designed for complex numerical reasoning over tables. Experimental results demonstrate that \method consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with 8.79%, 6.08%, and 19.87% accuracy improvement on TAT-QA, TableBench, and \method, respectively. Moreover, our framework integrates seamlessly with mainstream LLMs, providing a robust solution for complex tabular numerical reasoning. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing LLM performance for complex tabular numerical reasoning. Data and code are available upon request.

Recent research in tabular data synthesis has focused on single tables, whereas real-world applications often involve complex data with tens or hundreds of interconnected tables. Previous approaches to synthesizing multi-relational (multi-table) data fall short in two key aspects: scalability for larger datasets and capturing long-range dependencies, such as correlations between attributes spread across different tables. Inspired by the success of diffusion models in tabular data modeling, we introduce Cluster Latent Variable guided Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (ClavaDDPM). This novel approach leverages clustering labels as intermediaries to model relationships between tables, specifically focusing on foreign key constraints. ClavaDDPM leverages the robust generation capabilities of diffusion models while incorporating efficient algorithms to propagate the learned latent variables across tables. This enables ClavaDDPM to capture long-range dependencies effectively. Extensive evaluations on multi-table datasets of varying sizes show that ClavaDDPM significantly outperforms existing methods for these long-range dependencies while remaining competitive on utility metrics for single-table data.

Despite its real-world significance, model performance on tabular data remains underexplored, leaving uncertainty about which model to rely on and which prompt configuration to adopt. To address this gap, we create ToRR, a benchmark for Table Reasoning and Robustness, measuring model performance and robustness on table-related tasks. The benchmark includes 10 datasets that cover different types of table reasoning capabilities across varied domains. ToRR goes beyond model performance rankings, and is designed to reflect whether models can handle tabular data consistently and robustly, across a variety of common table representation formats. We present a leaderboard as well as comprehensive analyses of the results of leading models over ToRR. Our results reveal a striking pattern of brittle model behavior, where even strong models are unable to perform robustly on tabular data tasks. Although no specific table format leads to consistently better performance, we show that testing over multiple formats is crucial for reliably estimating model capabilities. Moreover, we show that the reliability boost from testing multiple prompts can be equivalent to adding more test examples. Overall, our findings show that table understanding and reasoning tasks remain a significant challenge.

Hyperparameter tuning can dramatically impact training stability and final performance of large-scale models. Recent works on neural network parameterisations, such as μP, have enabled transfer of optimal global hyperparameters across model sizes. These works propose an empirical practice of search for optimal global base hyperparameters at a small model size, and transfer to a large size. We extend these works in two key ways. To handle scaling along most important scaling axes, we propose the Complete^{(d)} Parameterisation that unifies scaling in width and depth -- using an adaptation of CompleteP -- as well as in batch-size and training duration. Secondly, with our parameterisation, we investigate per-module hyperparameter optimisation and transfer. We characterise the empirical challenges of navigating the high-dimensional hyperparameter landscape, and propose practical guidelines for tackling this optimisation problem. We demonstrate that, with the right parameterisation, hyperparameter transfer holds even in the per-module hyperparameter regime. Our study covers an extensive range of optimisation hyperparameters of modern models: learning rates, AdamW parameters, weight decay, initialisation scales, and residual block multipliers. Our experiments demonstrate significant training speed improvements in Large Language Models with the transferred per-module hyperparameters.

Table Question Answering (Table QA) in real-world settings must operate over both structured databases and semi-structured tables containing textual fields. However, existing benchmarks are tied to fixed data formats and have not systematically examined how representation itself affects model performance. We present the first controlled study that isolates the role of table representation by holding content constant while varying structure. Using a verbalization pipeline, we generate paired structured and semi-structured tables, enabling direct comparisons across modeling paradigms. To support detailed analysis, we introduce RePairTQA, a diagnostic benchmark with splits along table size, join requirements, query complexity, and schema quality. Our experiments reveal consistent trade-offs: SQL-based methods achieve high accuracy on structured inputs but degrade on semi-structured data, LLMs exhibit flexibility but reduced precision, and hybrid approaches strike a balance, particularly under noisy schemas. These effects intensify with larger tables and more complex queries. Ultimately, no single method excels across all conditions, and we highlight the central role of representation in shaping Table QA performance. Our findings provide actionable insights for model selection and design, paving the way for more robust hybrid approaches suited for diverse real-world data formats.

Despite the rapid progress of LLM-based agents for planning, code generation, and debugging, their practical value for tabular machine learning remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate a concrete use case: whether state-of-the-art agentic AI systems can design extended HPO search spaces for established tabular models that outperform the standard search spaces provided by the model authors. Specifically, we represent each tabular model as a modular pipeline covering preprocessing, embeddings, architecture, training, and inference. We then task the agent to propose candidate code implementations for each module and use a classical HPO algorithm to jointly optimize over these candidates and the model's default hyperparameters. Compared with the base HPO spaces, the expanded search spaces improve the performance of nearly every model family across a suite of 45 datasets, with average relative gains of 0.6%, rising to 2.0% on small-to-medium regression datasets. Notably, these gains come at no extra tuning cost: the enlarged spaces outperform the base under the same tuning and ensembling budgets. The gains transfer to the recent TabArena benchmark, where the agentic spaces improve the official Elo scores of four of the five model families and the two strongest agentic ensembles surpass the best AutoGluon ensemble of conventional models. Overall, our study suggests that LLM agents can provide practical value for tabular ML by expanding the design space.

We study compute efficiency of LLM training when using different parameterizations, i.e., rules for adjusting model and optimizer hyperparameters (HPs) as model size changes. Some parameterizations fail to transfer optimal base HPs (such as learning rate) across changes in model depth, requiring practitioners to either re-tune these HPs as they scale up (expensive), or accept sub-optimal training when re-tuning is prohibitive. Even when they achieve HP transfer, we develop theory to show parameterizations may still exist in the lazy learning regime where layers learn only features close to their linearization, preventing effective use of depth and nonlinearity. Finally, we identify and adopt the parameterization we call CompleteP that achieves both depth-wise HP transfer and non-lazy learning in all layers. CompleteP enables a wider range of model width/depth ratios to remain compute-efficient, unlocking shapes better suited for different hardware settings and operational contexts. Moreover, CompleteP enables 12-34% compute efficiency improvements over the prior state-of-the-art.

Model cards describe model behavior through a mixture of textual descriptions and structured artifacts, including performance, configuration, and dataset tables. Existing model search systems rely predominantly on semantic similarity over text, which can produce homogeneous result sets and limit exploration of alternatives. We argue that model search is inherently comparative: users want models that are task-aligned yet differentiated in measurable ways. We hypothesize that this balance requires retrieval over condensed, high-quality evidence rather than verbose descriptions, and much of that evidence is concentrated in structured tables. We present StructuredSemanticSearch, a table-driven model search framework built on the ModelTables benchmark. Given a query, StructuredSemanticSearch combines a semantic baseline for task alignment with a structure-aware pipeline that discovers query-related model-card tables using table discovery operators such as unionability, joinability, and keyword search. Retrieved tables are mapped back to model cards under a controlled top-k budget, enabling fair comparison between text-based and table-based retrieval. Beyond retrieval, StructuredSemanticSearch adapts table integration to the model-table domain through orientation-aware integration, producing compact integrated views of tables from partially overlapping and sometimes transposed evidence tables. For evaluation, we introduce a nugget-based, auditable protocol that extracts compact evidence items from model cards, matches queries to condition- or intent-specific nuggets, and measures evidence coverage and diversity over retrieved model-card candidate sets. This protocol also provides a scalable path toward approximate, evidence-based labeling in dynamic model lakes. Experiments on 597 model-recommendation queries show improved nugget coverage for the structure-aware pipeline than semantic baseline

The emergence of models like GPTs, Claude, LLaMA, and Qwen has reshaped AI applications, presenting vast new opportunities across industries. Yet, the integration of tabular data remains notably underdeveloped, despite its foundational role in numerous real-world domains. This gap is critical for three main reasons. First, database or data warehouse data integration is essential for advanced applications; second, the vast and largely untapped resource of tabular data offers immense potential for analysis; and third, the business intelligence domain specifically demands adaptable, precise solutions that many current LLMs may struggle to provide. In response, we introduce TableGPT2, a model rigorously pre-trained and fine-tuned with over 593.8K tables and 2.36M high-quality query-table-output tuples, a scale of table-related data unprecedented in prior research. This extensive training enables TableGPT2 to excel in table-centric tasks while maintaining strong general language and coding abilities. One of TableGPT2's key innovations is its novel table encoder, specifically designed to capture schema-level and cell-level information. This encoder strengthens the model's ability to handle ambiguous queries, missing column names, and irregular tables commonly encountered in real-world applications. Similar to visual language models, this pioneering approach integrates with the decoder to form a robust large multimodal model. We believe the results are compelling: over 23 benchmarking metrics, TableGPT2 achieves an average performance improvement of 35.20% in the 7B model and 49.32% in the 72B model over prior benchmark-neutral LLMs, with robust general-purpose capabilities intact.

Tables are fundamental in domains such as finance, healthcare, and public administration, yet real-world table tasks often involve noise, structural heterogeneity, and semantic complexity--issues underexplored in existing research that primarily targets clean academic datasets. This survey focuses on LLM-based Table Agents, which aim to automate table-centric workflows by integrating preprocessing, reasoning, and domain adaptation. We define five core competencies--C1: Table Structure Understanding, C2: Table and Query Semantic Understanding, C3: Table Retrieval and Compression, C4: Executable Reasoning with Traceability, and C5: Cross-Domain Generalization--to analyze and compare current approaches. In addition, a detailed examination of the Text-to-SQL Agent reveals a performance gap between academic benchmarks and real-world scenarios, especially for open-source models. Finally, we provide actionable insights to improve the robustness, generalization, and efficiency of LLM-based Table Agents in practical settings.

Recent advances in tabular question answering (QA) with large language models are constrained in their coverage and only answer questions over a single table. However, real-world queries are complex in nature, often over multiple tables in a relational database or web page. Single table questions do not involve common table operations such as set operations, Cartesian products (joins), or nested queries. Furthermore, multi-table operations often result in a tabular output, which necessitates table generation capabilities of tabular QA models. To fill this gap, we propose a new task of answering questions over multiple tables. Our model, MultiTabQA, not only answers questions over multiple tables, but also generalizes to generate tabular answers. To enable effective training, we build a pre-training dataset comprising of 132,645 SQL queries and tabular answers. Further, we evaluate the generated tables by introducing table-specific metrics of varying strictness assessing various levels of granularity of the table structure. MultiTabQA outperforms state-of-the-art single table QA models adapted to a multi-table QA setting by finetuning on three datasets: Spider, Atis and GeoQuery.

Relational tables, where each row corresponds to an entity and each column corresponds to an attribute, have been the standard for tables in relational databases. However, such a standard cannot be taken for granted when dealing with tables "in the wild". Our survey of real spreadsheet-tables and web-tables shows that over 30% of such tables do not conform to the relational standard, for which complex table-restructuring transformations are needed before these tables can be queried easily using SQL-based analytics tools. Unfortunately, the required transformations are non-trivial to program, which has become a substantial pain point for technical and non-technical users alike, as evidenced by large numbers of forum questions in places like StackOverflow and Excel/Power-BI/Tableau forums. We develop an Auto-Tables system that can automatically synthesize pipelines with multi-step transformations (in Python or other languages), to transform non-relational tables into standard relational forms for downstream analytics, obviating the need for users to manually program transformations. We compile an extensive benchmark for this new task, by collecting 244 real test cases from user spreadsheets and online forums. Our evaluation suggests that Auto-Tables can successfully synthesize transformations for over 70% of test cases at interactive speeds, without requiring any input from users, making this an effective tool for both technical and non-technical users to prepare data for analytics.

Modeling semantic and structural information from tabular data remains a core challenge for effective table understanding. Existing Table-as-Text approaches flatten tables for large language models (LLMs), but lose crucial structural cues, while Table-as-Image methods preserve structure yet struggle with fine-grained semantics. Recent Table-as-Multimodality strategies attempt to combine textual and visual views, but they (1) statically process both modalities for every query-table pair within a large multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), inevitably introducing redundancy and even conflicts, and (2) depend on costly fine-tuning of MLLMs. In light of this, we propose TableDART, a training-efficient framework that integrates multimodal views by reusing pretrained single-modality models. TableDART introduces a lightweight 2.59M-parameter MLP gating network that dynamically selects the optimal path (either Text-only, Image-only, or Fusion) for each table-query pair, effectively reducing redundancy and conflicts from both modalities. In addition, we propose a novel agent to mediate cross-modal knowledge integration by analyzing outputs from text- and image-based models, either selecting the best result or synthesizing a new answer through reasoning. This design avoids the prohibitive costs of full MLLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks show that TableDART establishes new state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, surpassing the strongest baseline by an average of 4.02%. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TableDART-C52B

Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretization and apply feature-agnostic supervision. We propose Adaptive Binning, a training-adaptive discretization pretext for tabular SSL that couples discretization to learning through a feature-wise coarse-to-fine curriculum. Motivated by the spectral bias of neural networks and the principles of curriculum learning, our method progressively refines discretization per feature upon plateau detection and selects representation-aware splits to jointly improve value-space concentration and representation-space coherence. A heterogeneity-aware objective unifies categorical reconstruction with ordinal supervision for numerical features, and experiments on public medical tabular datasets under unified evaluation protocols show consistent gains for linear probing and fine-tuning without dataset-specific discretization tuning. We further introduce a medical tabular SSL benchmark with standardized protocols to support reproducible progress in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/Adaptive-Binning.

In recent times Large Language Models have exhibited tremendous capabilities, especially in the areas of mathematics, code generation and general-purpose reasoning. However for specialized domains especially in applications that require parsing and analyzing large chunks of numeric or tabular data even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models struggle. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to solving domain-specific tabular data analysis tasks by presenting a unique RAG workflow that mitigates the scalability issues of existing tabular LLM solutions. Specifically, we present Tabular Embedding Model (TEM), a novel approach to fine-tune embedding models for tabular Retrieval-Augmentation Generation (RAG) applications. Embedding models form a crucial component in the RAG workflow and even current SOTA embedding models struggle as they are predominantly trained on textual datasets and thus underperform in scenarios involving complex tabular data. The evaluation results showcase that our approach not only outperforms current SOTA embedding models in this domain but also does so with a notably smaller and more efficient model structure.

In this paper, we propose a highly parameter-efficient approach to scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) to a deeper model depth. Unlike prior work that shares all parameters or uses extra blocks, we design a more capable parameter-sharing architecture based on matrix product operator (MPO). MPO decomposition can reorganize and factorize the information of a parameter matrix into two parts: the major part that contains the major information (central tensor) and the supplementary part that only has a small proportion of parameters (auxiliary tensors). Based on such a decomposition, our architecture shares the central tensor across all layers for reducing the model size and meanwhile keeps layer-specific auxiliary tensors (also using adapters) for enhancing the adaptation flexibility. To improve the model training, we further propose a stable initialization algorithm tailored for the MPO-based architecture. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model in reducing the model size and achieving highly competitive performance.

Feature preprocessing continues to play a critical role when applying machine learning and statistical methods to tabular data. In this paper, we propose the use of the kernel density integral transformation as a feature preprocessing step. Our approach subsumes the two leading feature preprocessing methods as limiting cases: linear min-max scaling and quantile transformation. We demonstrate that, without hyperparameter tuning, the kernel density integral transformation can be used as a simple drop-in replacement for either method, offering protection from the weaknesses of each. Alternatively, with tuning of a single continuous hyperparameter, we frequently outperform both of these methods. Finally, we show that the kernel density transformation can be profitably applied to statistical data analysis, particularly in correlation analysis and univariate clustering.

In a small language model the vocabulary is the single largest part. In Gemma 3 270M the embedding table holds 168M of 268M parameters, and because quantisation methods leave the embedding in 16-bit, it is also most of the file once the rest of the model is compressed. We ask what that table actually buys. We replace it with one frozen table of 512-bit codes, 16 MB, with no trainable parameters, derived once from a pretrained embedding by principal-component projection and sign binarisation, and we train the same Gemma-shaped body from scratch on the same 2.05B tokens with and without it. The learned table buys 0.20 nats of validation loss for 2.6 times the trainable parameters, but on LAMBADA, HellaSwag and PIQA the frozen-table model is better or tied; only ARC-Easy favours the learned table. With a ternary BitNet b1.58 body the whole model is a 46 MB file, still ties the float model on LAMBADA and PIQA, and on a laptop CPU generates 615 to 740 tokens per second in 62 MB of memory, five to six times the speed of the float model's 8-bit GGUF in llama.cpp at a seventh of the memory. The frozen table wins by 1.7 to 2.3 nats on rare words, accepts 10,000 new words after training with a 3% cost where the learned table collapses by 43%, and all of it is released with the weights, the data and every evaluation answer.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Query-focused table summarization requires generating natural language summaries of tabular data conditioned on a user query, enabling users to access insights beyond fact retrieval. Existing approaches face key limitations: table-to-text models require costly fine-tuning and struggle with complex reasoning, prompt-based LLM methods suffer from token-limit and efficiency issues while exposing sensitive data, and prior agentic pipelines often rely on decomposition, planning, or manual templates that lack robustness and scalability. To mitigate these issues, we introduce an agentic workflow, FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS produces offline templates, consisting of SQL queries and Jinja2 templates, which can be rendered into natural language summaries and are reusable across multiple tables sharing the same schema. It enables fast summarization through reusable offline templates, accurate outputs with executable SQL queries, and privacy compliance by sending only table schemas to LLMs. Evaluations on widely-used benchmarks show that FACTS consistently outperforms baseline methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-world query-focused table summarization.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

With growing attention to tabular data these days, the attempt to apply a synthetic table to various tasks has been expanded toward various scenarios. Owing to the recent advances in generative modeling, fake data generated by tabular data synthesis models become sophisticated and realistic. However, there still exists a difficulty in modeling discrete variables (columns) of tabular data. In this work, we propose to process continuous and discrete variables separately (but being conditioned on each other) by two diffusion models. The two diffusion models are co-evolved during training by reading conditions from each other. In order to further bind the diffusion models, moreover, we introduce a contrastive learning method with a negative sampling method. In our experiments with 11 real-world tabular datasets and 8 baseline methods, we prove the efficacy of the proposed method, called CoDi.

The growing scale of deep learning models has rendered standard hyperparameter (HP) optimization prohibitively expensive. A promising solution is the use of scale-aware hyperparameters, which can enable direct transfer of optimal HPs from small-scale grid searches to large models with minimal performance loss. To understand the principles governing such transfer strategy, we develop a general conceptual framework for reasoning about HP transfer across scale, characterizing transfer as fast when the suboptimality it induces vanishes asymptotically faster than the finite-scale performance gap. We show formally that fast transfer is equivalent to useful transfer for compute-optimal grid search, meaning that transfer is asymptotically more compute-efficient than direct tuning. While empirical work has found that the Maximal Update Parameterization (μP) exhibits fast transfer when scaling model width, the mechanisms remain poorly understood. We show that this property depends critically on problem structure by presenting synthetic settings where transfer either offers provable computational advantage or fails to outperform direct tuning even under μP. To explain the fast transfer observed in practice, we conjecture that decomposing the optimization trajectory reveals two contributions to loss reduction: (1) a width-stable component that determines the optimal HPs, and (2) a width-sensitive component that improves with width but weakly perturbs the HP optimum. We present empirical evidence for this hypothesis across various settings, including large language model pretraining.

A trainable input embedding table assigns each vocabulary item an independently adjustable vector. We investigate whether this token-specific parameterization is required for substantial language-modeling capability, or whether a shared Transformer can learn from fixed token identities. We compare three decoder-only language models trained from scratch with the same tokenizer, contextual backbone, untied output-head architecture, and training recipe, with a target budget of 100 billion prediction tokens per model. Their input interfaces are a learned table, canonical 16-bit token-ID codes, and one fixed invertible recoding over GF(2). The fixed codes are repeated to model width without an additional trainable input projection. Both fixed-code models acquire substantial capabilities: canonical codes achieve 52.40\% HellaSwag normalized accuracy, 70.51\% PIQA accuracy, and 42.75\% LAMBADA accuracy. The learned-input control performs better on several evaluations, including HellaSwag and LAMBADA, so these results establish viability rather than performance parity. The fixed interfaces remove 100.7 million trainable parameters, yielding 1.711B-parameter models, but parameter reduction is not the central result. These single-run experiments distinguish architectural necessity from empirical utility: independently trainable token-specific input vectors are not required for the observed capabilities. A fixed identity interface also provides a controlled setting for studying representation learning downstream of an immutable input, without establishing where particular capabilities are localized.

The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their remarkable parameter size and their impressive high requirement of computing resources pose challenges for their practical deployment. Recent research has revealed that specific capabilities of LLMs, such as numerical reasoning, can be transferred to smaller models through distillation. Some studies explore the potential of leveraging LLMs to perform table-based reasoning. Nevertheless, prior to our work, there has been no investigation into the prospect of specialising table reasoning skills in smaller models specifically tailored for table-to-text generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel table-based reasoning distillation, with the aim of distilling distilling LLMs into tailored, smaller models specifically designed for table-based reasoning task. Experimental results have shown that a 0.22 billion parameter model (Flan-T5-base) fine-tuned using distilled data, not only achieves a significant improvement compared to traditionally fine-tuned baselines but also surpasses specific LLMs like gpt-3.5-turbo on the scientific table-to-text generation dataset (SciGen). The code and data are released in https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/TableDistill.

This first release of Prior Labs in relational learning shows our continued commitment to open science. We open-source three pieces of software that we expect to accelerate research in the field towards meaningful real-world impact. We aim to steer further development based on feedback from, and in collaboration with, the community. Given the early stage of development, our α-release targets researchers and early-adopting practitioners. Over the past years, a variety of datasets and tasks for relational learning have emerged, but the community has not converged on a reliable, reproducible way to compare different methods on these tasks. Our α-release, RelArena-α, provides a unified framework for running and comparing baselines on RelBench v1 by standardizing data loading, evaluation protocols, tuning regimes, and support for systems with custom tuning, inspired by established tabular benchmarks such as TabArena. We plan to work with the research community to further develop RelArena-α into a catalyst for progress in the relational learning community. We release the initial version of TabPFN-Rel, a purpose-built relational harness for TabPFN-3. Currently ranked first among models on RelArena-α, TabPFN-Rel makes key improvements upon RDBLearn. Beyond its ranking, TabPFN-Rel serves as a strong baseline, adding to the growing evidence that flattening a relational database into a single table remains competitive with specialized relational architectures on real-world tasks. To facilitate adoption of relational learning methods in research and industry, we release an initial α-version of our Relational Predictive Interface, RPI, an open-source, model-agnostic interface that enables early adopters to easily define problems on new databases and apply any model implemented in RelArena-α, including TabPFN-Rel, to these problems.

Recently, using automatic configuration tuning to improve the performance of modern database management systems (DBMSs) has attracted increasing interest from the database community. This is embodied with a number of systems featuring advanced tuning capabilities being developed. However, it remains a challenge to select the best solution for database configuration tuning, considering the large body of algorithm choices. In addition, beyond the applications on database systems, we could find more potential algorithms designed for configuration tuning. To this end, this paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of configuration tuning techniques from a broader perspective, hoping to better benefit the database community. In particular, we summarize three key modules of database configuration tuning systems and conduct extensive ablation studies using various challenging cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that the hyper-parameter optimization algorithms can be borrowed to further enhance the database configuration tuning. Moreover, we identify the best algorithm choices for different modules. Beyond the comprehensive evaluations, we offer an efficient and unified database configuration tuning benchmark via surrogates that reduces the evaluation cost to a minimum, allowing for extensive runs and analysis of new techniques.

Large-scale document processing requires contextually aware table extraction (TE) that is both accurate and efficient. Yet current approaches require billions of parameters, hundreds of autoregressive steps, or costly API inference. Motivated by this, we introduce the Page-Object Table Transformer (POTATR), a lightweight 29M parameter image-to-graph model that extends the Table Transformer (TATR) for contextualized page-level TE. POTATR outperforms all models tested on the PubTables-v2 Single Pages benchmark -- including frontier MLLMs -- achieving GriTS_Con of 0.964 while running over 130times faster at roughly 300times lower cost. Further, POTATR's output is spatially grounded: every recognized element has a bounding box, enabling visual verification and geometric text assignment. As a result, POTATR performs unified page-level TE while composing with other models, enabling extension to scanned documents via external OCR and to full-document TE via techniques like cross-page merging. Code and models will be released.

Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) facilitate data-driven decision-making by learning from complex multi-table databases. However, the diverse relational databases needed to train such models are rarely public due to privacy constraints. While there are methods to generate synthetic tabular data of arbitrary size, incorporating schema structure and primary--foreign key connectivity for multi-table generation remains challenging. Here we introduce PluRel, a framework to synthesize multi-tabular relational databases from scratch. In a step-by-step fashion, PluRel models (1) schemas with directed graphs, (2) inter-table primary-foreign key connectivity with bipartite graphs, and, (3) feature distributions in tables via conditional causal mechanisms. The design space across these stages supports the synthesis of a wide range of diverse databases, while being computationally lightweight. Using PluRel, we observe for the first time that (1) RFM pretraining loss exhibits power-law scaling with the number of synthetic databases and total pretraining tokens, (2) scaling the number of synthetic databases improves generalization to real databases, and (3) synthetic pretraining yields strong base models for continued pretraining on real databases. Overall, our framework and results position synthetic data scaling as a promising paradigm for RFMs.

Table reasoning is a challenging task that requires understanding both natural language questions and structured tabular data. Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but they often struggle with large tables due to their limited input length. In this paper, we propose TabSQLify, a novel method that leverages text-to-SQL generation to decompose tables into smaller and relevant sub-tables, containing only essential information for answering questions or verifying statements, before performing the reasoning task. In our comprehensive evaluation on four challenging datasets, our approach demonstrates comparable or superior performance compared to prevailing methods reliant on full tables as input. Moreover, our method can reduce the input context length significantly, making it more scalable and efficient for large-scale table reasoning applications. Our method performs remarkably well on the WikiTQ benchmark, achieving an accuracy of 64.7%. Additionally, on the TabFact benchmark, it achieves a high accuracy of 79.5%. These results surpass other LLM-based baseline models on gpt-3.5-turbo (chatgpt). TabSQLify can reduce the table size significantly alleviating the computational load on LLMs when handling large tables without compromising performance.

Tables are widely used in documents because of their compact and structured representation of information. In particular, in scientific papers, tables can sum up novel discoveries and summarize experimental results, making the research comparable and easily understandable by scholars. Since the layout of tables is highly variable, it would be useful to interpret their content and classify them into categories. This could be helpful to directly extract information from scientific papers, for instance comparing performance of some models given their paper result tables. In this work, we address the classification of tables using a Graph Neural Network, exploiting the table structure for the message passing algorithm in use. We evaluate our model on a subset of the Tab2Know dataset. Since it contains few examples manually annotated, we propose data augmentation techniques directly on the table graph structures. We achieve promising preliminary results, proposing a data augmentation method suitable for graph-based table representation.

Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. Although substantial progress has been made on math word problems, the need for reasoning over tabular data in real-world applications has been overlooked. For instance, applications such as business intelligence demand not only multi-step numerical reasoning with tables but also robustness to incomplete or inconsistent information. However, comprehensive evaluation in this area is severely limited, constrained by the reliance on manually collected tables that are difficult to scale and the lack of coverage for potential traps encountered in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose AutoT2T, a neuro-symbolic framework that controllably transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. Building on this pipeline, we develop TabularMath, a benchmark comprising four subsets that include both text-based and image-based tables, covering table complexity, table quality, and table representation dimensions. Our study reveals three key observations: (1) Table complexity and reasoning difficulty impact reasoning performance jointly; (2) Low-quality tables pose severe risks to reliable reasoning in current LLMs; (3) Different table modalities show similar trends, with text-based tables typically being easier for models to reason over. In-depth analyses are conducted for each observation to guide future research.

Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry. Research communities across disciplines are increasingly evaluating tabular foundation models on diverse datasets and tasks. However, these task- and discipline-specific evaluations remain largely inaccessible to model researchers because benchmark software and evaluation protocols are fragmented. As a result, model researchers rely on standard benchmarks, which are mostly defined for tasks where tabular foundation models already excel. The most challenging scenarios are excluded, limiting meaningful progress in the field by focusing on marginal improvements on IID data rather than on broader, more demanding challenges. To overcome this, we introduce BeyondArena, the first unified holistic benchmark for tabular data that supports diverse task types (IID, temporal, grouped), across sample size and feature dimensionality scales, with diverse feature types (with text, with high cardinality) from a broad range of disciplines. To enable unified benchmarking beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce Data Foundry, a Python framework and metadata schema for curating tabular datasets for predictive machine learning. Our results across 11 models and 142 curated datasets show that existing tabular foundation models excel on tiny- to medium-sized IID data, while traditional tree-based and deep learning models still dominate on non-IID, large, and high-dimensional datasets. BeyondArena guides model research for the most demanding challenges in tabular data, enabling progress towards truly foundational tabular models.

Foundation models need to support diverse inference budgets, yet training a separate model for each budget duplicates pretraining effort. Elastic models train several nested sub-networks inside one weight-shared supernet, but existing recipes face three obstacles: variable per-step workloads that hinder distributed scaling, limited hyperparameter (HP) transfer across model sizes, and no guarantee that all sub-networks are maximally updated at once. We present \Ours, an elastic transformer that organizes hidden dimensions into a dense core and successive shells, so that every hidden matrix is block lower triangular. One full-width forward pass contains every sub-network's exact hidden states as prefixes, so joint training keeps a fixed computation graph and costs about as much per step as training the widest sub-network alone. We further introduce \muE, an extension of maximal update parameterization (\mup) to \Ours and other elastic architectures. Its scaling rules provably keep all sub-networks of a supernet maximally updated simultaneously (\muI), and keep doing so when the supernet is widened or given more shells; sweeps confirm that HPs tuned on a small non-elastic proxy stay near-optimal for elastic families and larger supernets (\muT). A single \Ours run produces sub-networks that outperform MatFormer and fully elastic baselines at matched parameter counts, and approach separately trained models that together take several times the steps.

Novel machine learning methods for tabular data generation are often developed on small datasets which do not match the scale required for scientific applications. We investigate a recent proposal to use XGBoost as the function approximator in diffusion and flow-matching models on tabular data, which proved to be extremely memory intensive, even on tiny datasets. In this work, we conduct a critical analysis of the existing implementation from an engineering perspective, and show that these limitations are not fundamental to the method; with better implementation it can be scaled to datasets 370x larger than previously used. Our efficient implementation also unlocks scaling models to much larger sizes which we show directly leads to improved performance on benchmark tasks. We also propose algorithmic improvements that can further benefit resource usage and model performance, including multi-output trees which are well-suited to generative modeling. Finally, we present results on large-scale scientific datasets derived from experimental particle physics as part of the Fast Calorimeter Simulation Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/calo-forest.

Tabular data (or tables) are the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). However, ML models often assume the table structure keeps fixed in training and testing. Before ML modeling, heavy data cleaning is required to merge disparate tables with different columns. This preprocessing often incurs significant data waste (e.g., removing unmatched columns and samples). How to learn ML models from multiple tables with partially overlapping columns? How to incrementally update ML models as more columns become available over time? Can we leverage model pretraining on multiple distinct tables? How to train an ML model which can predict on an unseen table? To answer all those questions, we propose to relax fixed table structures by introducing a Transferable Tabular Transformer (TransTab) for tables. The goal of TransTab is to convert each sample (a row in the table) to a generalizable embedding vector, and then apply stacked transformers for feature encoding. One methodology insight is combining column description and table cells as the raw input to a gated transformer model. The other insight is to introduce supervised and self-supervised pretraining to improve model performance. We compare TransTab with multiple baseline methods on diverse benchmark datasets and five oncology clinical trial datasets. Overall, TransTab ranks 1.00, 1.00, 1.78 out of 12 methods in supervised learning, feature incremental learning, and transfer learning scenarios, respectively; and the proposed pretraining leads to 2.3% AUC lift on average over the supervised learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6% on WIKITABLEQUESTIONS, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.

Large models represent a groundbreaking advancement in multiple application fields, enabling remarkable achievements across various tasks. However, their unprecedented scale comes with significant computational costs. These models, often consisting of billions of parameters, require vast amounts of computational resources for execution. Especially, the expansive scale and computational demands pose considerable challenges when customizing them for particular downstream tasks, particularly over the hardware platforms constrained by computational capabilities. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides a practical solution by efficiently adapt the large models over the various downstream tasks. In particular, PEFT refers to the process of adjusting the parameters of a pre-trained large models to adapt it to a specific task while minimizing the number of additional parameters introduced or computational resources required. This approach is particularly important when dealing with large language models with high parameter counts, as fine-tuning these models from scratch can be computationally expensive and resource-intensive, posing considerable challenges in the supporting system platform design. In this survey, we present comprehensive studies of various PEFT algorithms, examining their performance and computational overhead. Moreover, we provide an overview of applications developed using different PEFT algorithms and discuss common techniques employed to mitigate computation costs for PEFT. In addition to the algorithmic perspective, we overview various real-world system designs to investigate the implementation costs associated with different PEFT algorithms. This survey serves as an indispensable resource for researchers aiming to understand both the PEFT algorithm and its system implementation, offering detailed insights into recent advancements and practical applications.

Generative foundation models are increasingly scaled in both width and depth, posing significant challenges for stable feature learning and reliable hyperparameter (HP) transfer across model sizes. While maximal update parameterization (μP) has provided a principled solution to both problems for width scaling, existing extensions to the joint width-depth scaling regime remain fragmented, architecture- and optimizer-specific, and often rely on technically involved theories. In this work, we develop a simple and unified spectral framework for μP under joint width-depth scaling. Considering residual networks of varying block depths, we first introduce a spectral μP condition that precisely characterizes how the norms of weights and their per-step updates should scale with width and depth, unifying previously disparate μP formulations as special cases. Building on this condition, we then derive a general recipe for implementing μP across a broad class of optimizers by mapping the spectral constraints to concrete HP parameterizations. This approach not only recovers existing μP formulations (e.g., for SGD and AdamW) but also naturally extends to a wider range of optimizers. Finally, experiments on GPT-2 style language models demonstrate that the proposed spectral μP condition preserves stable feature learning and enables robust HP transfer under width-depth scaling.

In this work, we propose a communication-efficient parameterization, FedPara, for federated learning (FL) to overcome the burdens on frequent model uploads and downloads. Our method re-parameterizes weight parameters of layers using low-rank weights followed by the Hadamard product. Compared to the conventional low-rank parameterization, our FedPara method is not restricted to low-rank constraints, and thereby it has a far larger capacity. This property enables to achieve comparable performance while requiring 3 to 10 times lower communication costs than the model with the original layers, which is not achievable by the traditional low-rank methods. The efficiency of our method can be further improved by combining with other efficient FL optimizers. In addition, we extend our method to a personalized FL application, pFedPara, which separates parameters into global and local ones. We show that pFedPara outperforms competing personalized FL methods with more than three times fewer parameters.

Table reasoning, encompassing tasks such as table question answering, fact verification, and text-to-SQL, requires precise understanding of structured tabular data, coupled with numerical computation and code manipulation for effective inference. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have achieved notable success but often struggle with generalization and robustness due to biases inherent in imitative learning. We introduce Reasoning-Table, the first application of reinforcement learning (RL) to table reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Through rigorous data preprocessing, reward design, and tailored training strategies, our method leverages simple rule-based outcome rewards to outperform SFT across multiple benchmarks. Unified training across diverse tasks enables Reasoning-Table to emerge as a robust table reasoning large language model, surpassing larger proprietary models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet by 4.0% on table reasoning benchmarks. The approach also achieves excellent performance on text-to-SQL tasks, reaching 68.3% performance on the BIRD dev dataset with a 7B model. Further experiments demonstrate that Reasoning-Table enhances the model's generalization capabilities and robustness.

Tables in real-world documents, including scientific papers, financial reports, and statistical summaries, frequently use merged cells, multi-level headers, and sectioned layouts. Yet the lightweight formats LLMs handle best (Markdown, CSV) cannot express these structures, while expressive formats (HTML, LaTeX) impose excessive token cost and parsing complexity. To enable systematic analysis of this trade-off, we introduce a taxonomy decomposing table structure into six atomic features (F1-F6) and corresponding complexity levels (L1-L6), and construct STB (Synthetic Table Benchmark), a controlled benchmark with 1,089 tables systematically distributed across complexity levels. Using this framework, we propose LTEM (LLM-friendly Table-Enhanced Markdown), a formally specified, minimal extension of Markdown that explicitly encodes spans and hierarchical headers. Experiments across five state-of-the-art LLMs show that LTEM achieves accuracy comparable to HTML, offers a favorable accuracy-token trade-off relative to HTML and LaTeX, and produces substantially fewer invalid responses than LaTeX; for table generation, LTEM is comparable to MultiMarkdown though HTML is best. We release our taxonomy, benchmark, and format specification to support future research on LLM-table interaction.

We introduce TabRepo, a new dataset of tabular model evaluations and predictions. TabRepo contains the predictions and metrics of 1310 models evaluated on 200 classification and regression datasets. We illustrate the benefit of our dataset in multiple ways. First, we show that it allows to perform analysis such as comparing Hyperparameter Optimization against current AutoML systems while also considering ensembling at marginal cost by using precomputed model predictions. Second, we show that our dataset can be readily leveraged to perform transfer-learning. In particular, we show that applying standard transfer-learning techniques allows to outperform current state-of-the-art tabular systems in accuracy, runtime and latency.

Tables serve as a fundamental format for representing structured relational data. While current language models (LMs) excel at many text-based tasks, they still face challenges in table understanding due to the complex characteristics of tabular data, such as their structured nature. In this paper, we aim to enhance LMs for improved table understanding. We identify four key challenges: 1) difficulty in locating target data, 2) deficiency in table semantics, 3) numerical inaccuracies in textual reasoning, and 4) semantic inflexibility in symbolic reasoning. To address these issues, we propose TableMaster, a recipe and comprehensive framework that integrates multiple solutions to overcome these obstacles. TableMaster first extracts relevant table content and verbalizes it with enriched semantic context. Additionally, we introduce adaptive reasoning, a flexible approach that dynamically adjusts between textual and symbolic reasoning, tailoring the reasoning process to each query. Extensive analyses and experiments demonstrate our findings and the effectiveness of TableMaster. On the WikiTQ dataset, TableMaster achieves an accuracy of 78.13% using GPT-4o-mini, surpassing existing baselines. We hope this work will serve as a practical step toward more robust and reliable table understanding.

The challenges faced by neural networks on tabular data are well-documented and have hampered the progress of tabular foundation models. Techniques leveraging in-context learning (ICL) have shown promise here, allowing for dynamic adaptation to unseen data. ICL can provide predictions for entirely new datasets without further training or hyperparameter tuning, therefore providing very fast inference when encountering a novel task. However, scaling ICL for tabular data remains an issue: approaches based on large language models cannot efficiently process numeric tables, and tabular-specific techniques have not been able to effectively harness the power of real data to improve performance and generalization. We are able to overcome these challenges by training tabular-specific ICL-based architectures on real data with self-supervised learning and retrieval, combining the best of both worlds. Our resulting model -- the Tabular Discriminative Pre-trained Transformer (TabDPT) -- achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CC18 (classification) and CTR23 (regression) benchmarks with no task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating the adapatability and speed of ICL once the model is pre-trained. TabDPT also demonstrates strong scaling as both model size and amount of available data increase, pointing towards future improvements simply through the curation of larger tabular pre-training datasets and training larger models.

Recent advancements in NLP have witnessed the groundbreaking impact of pretrained models, yielding impressive outcomes across various tasks. This study seeks to extend the power of pretraining methodologies to facilitating the prediction over tables in data science, a domain traditionally overlooked, yet inherently challenging due to the plethora of table schemas intrinsic to different tasks. The primary research questions underpinning this work revolve around the establishment of a universal pretraining protocol for tables with varied structures, the generalizability and transferability of learned knowledge across tasks, the adaptation to diverse downstream applications, and the incorporation of incremental columns over time. In response to these challenges, we introduce UniTabE, a straightforward yet effective method designed to process tables in a uniform manner, devoid of constraints imposed by specific table structures. UniTabE's core concept relies on representing each basic table element with a module, termed TabUnit. This is subsequently followed by a Transformer encoder to refine the representation. Moreover, our model is designed to facilitate pretraining and finetuning through the utilization of free-form prompts. In order to implement the pretraining phase, we curated an expansive tabular dataset comprising approximately 13B samples, meticulously gathered from the Kaggle platform. This research primarily centers on classification and regression tasks involving tabular data, and conducts rigorous experimental testing and analyses to validate the effectiveness of our methodology. The experimental results demonstrate UniTabE's superior performance against several baselines across massive benchmarks. This, therefore, underscores UniTabE's potential to significantly enhance the semantic representation of tabular data, thereby marking a significant stride for tabular data analysis.

Despite the prevalence of tabular datasets, few-shot learning remains under-explored within this domain. Existing few-shot methods are not directly applicable to tabular datasets due to varying column relationships, meanings, and permutational invariance. To address these challenges, we propose FLAT-a novel approach to tabular few-shot learning, encompassing knowledge sharing between datasets with heterogeneous feature spaces. Utilizing an encoder inspired by Dataset2Vec, FLAT learns low-dimensional embeddings of datasets and their individual columns, which facilitate knowledge transfer and generalization to previously unseen datasets. A decoder network parametrizes the predictive target network, implemented as a Graph Attention Network, to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of tabular datasets. Experiments on a diverse collection of 118 UCI datasets demonstrate FLAT's successful generalization to new tabular datasets and a considerable improvement over the baselines.

Recent In-Context Learning based methods have achieved remarkable success in Text-to-SQL task. However, there is still a large gap between the performance of these models and human performance on datasets with complex database schema and difficult questions, such as BIRD. Besides, existing work has neglected to supervise intermediate steps when solving questions iteratively with question decomposition methods, and the schema linking methods used in these works are very rudimentary. To address these issues, we propose MAG-SQL, a multi-agent generative approach with soft schema linking and iterative Sub-SQL refinement. In our framework, an entity-based method with tables' summary is used to select the columns in database, and a novel targets-conditions decomposition method is introduced to decompose those complex questions. Additionally, we build a iterative generating module which includes a Sub-SQL Generator and Sub-SQL Refiner, introducing external oversight for each step of generation. Through a series of ablation studies, the effectiveness of each agent in our framework has been demonstrated. When evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with GPT-4, MAG-SQL achieves an execution accuracy of 61.08\%, compared to the baseline accuracy of 46.35\% for vanilla GPT-4 and the baseline accuracy of 57.56\% for MAC-SQL. Besides, our approach makes similar progress on Spider.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in parsing textual data and generating code. However, their performance in tasks involving tabular data, especially those requiring symbolic reasoning, faces challenges due to the structural variance and inconsistency in table cell values often found in web tables. In this paper, we introduce NormTab, a novel framework aimed at enhancing the symbolic reasoning performance of LLMs by normalizing web tables. We study table normalization as a stand-alone, one-time preprocessing step using LLMs to support symbolic reasoning on tabular data. Our experimental evaluation, conducted on challenging web table datasets such as WikiTableQuestion and TabFact, demonstrates that leveraging NormTab significantly improves symbolic reasoning performance, showcasing the importance and effectiveness of web table normalization for enhancing LLM-based symbolic reasoning tasks.

In this paper, we investigate the challenge of integrating tables from data lakes, focusing on three core tasks: 1) pairwise integrability judgment, which determines whether a tuple pair in a table is integrable, accounting for any occurrences of semantic equivalence or typographical errors; 2) integrable set discovery, which aims to identify all integrable sets in a table based on pairwise integrability judgments established in the first task; 3) multi-tuple conflict resolution, which resolves conflicts among multiple tuples during integration. We train a binary classifier to address the task of pairwise integrability judgment. Given the scarcity of labeled data, we propose a self-supervised adversarial contrastive learning algorithm to perform classification, which incorporates data augmentation methods and adversarial examples to autonomously generate new training data. Upon the output of pairwise integrability judgment, each integrable set is considered as a community, a densely connected sub-graph where nodes and edges correspond to tuples in the table and their pairwise integrability, respectively. We proceed to investigate various community detection algorithms to address the integrable set discovery objective. Moving forward to tackle multi-tuple conflict resolution, we introduce an novel in-context learning methodology. This approach capitalizes on the knowledge embedded within pretrained large language models to effectively resolve conflicts that arise when integrating multiple tuples. Notably, our method minimizes the need for annotated data. Since no suitable test collections are available for our tasks, we develop our own benchmarks using two real-word dataset repositories: Real and Join. We conduct extensive experiments on these benchmarks to validate the robustness and applicability of our methodologies in the context of integrating tables within data lakes.

Real-world tables are often heterogeneous, combining numerical features with free-form string columns. Table foundation models (TFMs) excel on numerical tables but require strings to be encoded numerically, while large language models (LLMs) hold semantic knowledge but are not designed for tabular predictions. Most existing bridges use LLMs as plug-in encoders for cell strings, yet how to extract representations effectively for tabular learning remains underexplored. We show that the interface between LLMs and tables matter as much as the LLM itself. Applied cell-wise, larger LLMs do not give better features. With our interface, the same LLMs improve steadily with size. TILE (Table-Interfaced LLM Embeddings) combines four ingredients: row serialization to provide cross-column context, intermediate-layer extraction to avoid layers specialized for next-token prediction, columnar pooling to remove mean pooling's length bias, and by-pass features to route numbers and categories past the LLM. Paired with TFMs, TILE sets a new state of the art for tables with strings. Across 100 datasets, it beats the strongest baseline on 89% of splits, with gains across 7 LLMs and 10 tabular learners, and ranks first on the 108-dataset STRABLE benchmark.

Extensive research has been conducted to explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in table reasoning. However, the essential task of transforming tables information into reports remains a significant challenge for industrial applications. This task is plagued by two critical issues: 1) the complexity and diversity of tables lead to suboptimal reasoning outcomes; and 2) existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of this task. To fill this gap, we propose the table-to-report task and construct a bilingual benchmark named T2R-bench, where the key information flow from the tables to the reports for this task. The benchmark comprises 457 industrial tables, all derived from real-world scenarios and encompassing 19 industry domains as well as 4 types of industrial tables. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation criteria to fairly measure the quality of report generation. The experiments on 25 widely-used LLMs reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Deepseek-R1 only achieves performance with 62.71 overall score, indicating that LLMs still have room for improvement on T2R-bench. Source code and data will be available after acceptance.

Tables are ubiquitous across various domains for concisely representing structured information. Empowering large language models (LLMs) to reason over tabular data represents an actively explored direction. However, since typical LLMs only support one-dimensional~(1D) inputs, existing methods often flatten the two-dimensional~(2D) table structure into a sequence of tokens, which can severely disrupt the spatial relationships and result in an inevitable loss of vital contextual information. In this paper, we first empirically demonstrate the detrimental impact of such flattening operations on the performance of LLMs in capturing the spatial information of tables through two elaborate proxy tasks. Subsequently, we introduce a simple yet effective positional encoding method, termed ``2D-TPE'' (Two-Dimensional Table Positional Encoding), to address this challenge. 2D-TPE enables each attention head to dynamically select a permutation order of tokens within the context for attending to them, where each permutation represents a distinct traversal mode for the table, such as column-wise or row-wise traversal. 2D-TPE effectively mitigates the risk of losing essential spatial information while preserving computational efficiency, thus better preserving the table structure. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that 2D-TPE outperforms strong baselines, underscoring the importance of preserving the table structure for accurate table comprehension. Comprehensive analysis further reveals the substantially better scalability of 2D-TPE to large tables than baselines.

Generation, imputation, and prediction query different aspects of the same tabular distribution, but are usually evaluated separately. This leaves unclear which capabilities they share, how their training objectives interact, and whether one model can perform all three well. We introduce the One Table Benchmark (), spanning 56 datasets, 46 registered methods, and 20 capability axes under aligned data splits and explicit task contracts. We compare task ranks on aligned support, train five backbones under all seven non-empty objective combinations on five datasets with three seeds, and contrast fixed-model profiles with specialist portfolios. Rank comparisons connect imputation and prediction through numerical recovery and dependence preservation, and link generation to both through predictive utility; distributional fidelity follows different, sometimes opposing, rankings. Objective interventions show the largest pooled gains from including the recipient's own objective. Generation has the broadest coverage of positive pooled auxiliary effects, while prediction shows potential to improve imputation and synthetic-data utility, with responses that vary across backbones. Cross-addition effects reveal that objective benefits need not add and depend on the objectives already present. Fixed-model comparisons expose corresponding utility--fidelity trade-offs: some generalists surpass specialist portfolios on utility, while fidelity continues to favor specialization. Frozen foundation models show strong prediction and numerical point imputation, together with promising synthetic-data utility, highlighting their potential across all three tasks. These findings motivate unified tabular models that share useful conditional information while improving categorical reconstruction and faithful joint sampling.

Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 6-48 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model's generalizability. We will open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.

The rapid scaling of large language models necessitates more lightweight finetuning methods to reduce the explosive GPU memory overhead when numerous customized models are served simultaneously. Targeting more parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), parameter sharing presents a promising solution. Empirically, our research into high-level sharing principles highlights the indispensable role of differentiation in reversing the detrimental effects of pure sharing. Guided by this finding, we propose Mixture of Shards (MoS), incorporating both inter-layer and intra-layer sharing schemes, and integrating four nearly cost-free differentiation strategies, namely subset selection, pair dissociation, vector sharding, and shard privatization. Briefly, it selects a designated number of shards from global pools with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-like routing mechanism before sequentially concatenating them to low-rank matrices. Hence, it retains all the advantages of LoRA while offering enhanced parameter efficiency, and effectively circumvents the drawbacks of peer parameter-sharing methods. Our empirical experiments demonstrate approximately 8x parameter savings in a standard LoRA setting. The ablation study confirms the significance of each component. Our insights into parameter sharing and MoS method may illuminate future developments of more parameter-efficient finetuning methods.

While deep learning has enabled tremendous progress on text and image datasets, its superiority on tabular data is not clear. We contribute extensive benchmarks of standard and novel deep learning methods as well as tree-based models such as XGBoost and Random Forests, across a large number of datasets and hyperparameter combinations. We define a standard set of 45 datasets from varied domains with clear characteristics of tabular data and a benchmarking methodology accounting for both fitting models and finding good hyperparameters. Results show that tree-based models remain state-of-the-art on medium-sized data (sim10K samples) even without accounting for their superior speed. To understand this gap, we conduct an empirical investigation into the differing inductive biases of tree-based models and Neural Networks (NNs). This leads to a series of challenges which should guide researchers aiming to build tabular-specific NNs: 1. be robust to uninformative features, 2. preserve the orientation of the data, and 3. be able to easily learn irregular functions. To stimulate research on tabular architectures, we contribute a standard benchmark and raw data for baselines: every point of a 20 000 compute hours hyperparameter search for each learner.

Tabular representation learning has recently gained a lot of attention. However, existing approaches only learn a representation from a single table, and thus ignore the potential to learn from the full structure of relational databases, including neighboring tables that can contain important information for a contextualized representation. Moreover, current models are significantly limited in scale, which prevents that they learn from large databases. In this paper, we thus introduce our vision of relational representation learning, that can not only learn from the full relational structure, but also can scale to larger database sizes that are commonly found in real-world. Moreover, we also discuss opportunities and challenges we see along the way to enable this vision and present initial very promising results. Overall, we argue that this direction can lead to foundation models for relational databases that are today only available for text and images.

Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and struggle with complex queries due to incomplete or dispersed data across different table sections. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processor suite for leveraging LLMs in table-based tasks effectively. It covers several distinct components: (1) table sampling to decompose large tables into manageable sub-tables based on query semantics, (2) table augmentation to enhance tables with additional knowledge from external sources or models, and (3) table packing & serialization to convert tables into various formats suitable for LLMs' understanding. In each module, we design and compare several common methods under various usage scenarios, aiming to shed light on the best practices for leveraging LLMs for table-reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that our method improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.

Learning embedding table plays a fundamental role in Click-through rate(CTR) prediction from the view of the model performance and memory usage. The embedding table is a two-dimensional tensor, with its axes indicating the number of feature values and the embedding dimension, respectively. To learn an efficient and effective embedding table, recent works either assign various embedding dimensions for feature fields and reduce the number of embeddings respectively or mask the embedding table parameters. However, all these existing works cannot get an optimal embedding table. On the one hand, various embedding dimensions still require a large amount of memory due to the vast number of features in the dataset. On the other hand, decreasing the number of embeddings usually suffers from performance degradation, which is intolerable in CTR prediction. Finally, pruning embedding parameters will lead to a sparse embedding table, which is hard to be deployed. To this end, we propose an optimal embedding table learning framework OptEmbed, which provides a practical and general method to find an optimal embedding table for various base CTR models. Specifically, we propose pruning the redundant embeddings regarding corresponding features' importance by learnable pruning thresholds. Furthermore, we consider assigning various embedding dimensions as one single candidate architecture. To efficiently search the optimal embedding dimensions, we design a uniform embedding dimension sampling scheme to equally train all candidate architectures, meaning architecture-related parameters and learnable thresholds are trained simultaneously in one supernet. We then propose an evolution search method based on the supernet to find the optimal embedding dimensions for each field. Experiments on public datasets show that OptEmbed can learn a compact embedding table which can further improve the model performance.

Tabular foundation models represent a growing paradigm in structured data learning, extending the benefits of large-scale pretraining to tabular domains. However, their adoption remains limited due to heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines, fragmented APIs, inconsistent fine-tuning procedures, and the absence of standardized evaluation for deployment-oriented metrics such as calibration and fairness. We present TabTune, a unified library that standardizes the complete workflow for tabular foundation models through a single interface. TabTune provides consistent access to seven state-of-the-art models supporting multiple adaptation strategies, including zero-shot inference, meta-learning, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). The framework automates model-aware preprocessing, manages architectural heterogeneity internally, and integrates evaluation modules for performance, calibration, and fairness. Designed for extensibility and reproducibility, TabTune enables consistent benchmarking of adaptation strategies of tabular foundation models. The library is open source and available at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/TabTune .

Tables are a popular and efficient means of presenting structured information. They are used extensively in various kinds of documents including web pages. Tables display information as a two-dimensional matrix, the semantics of which is conveyed by a mixture of structure (rows, columns), headers, caption, and content. Recent research has started to consider tables as first class objects, not just as an addendum to texts, yielding interesting results for problems like table matching, table completion, or value imputation. All of these problems inherently rely on an accurate measure for the semantic similarity of two tables. We present TabSim, a novel method to compute table similarity scores using deep neural networks. Conceptually, TabSim represents a table as a learned concatenation of embeddings of its caption, its content, and its structure. Given two tables in this representation, a Siamese neural network is trained to compute a score correlating with the tables' semantic similarity. To train and evaluate our method, we created a gold standard corpus consisting of 1500 table pairs extracted from biomedical articles and manually scored regarding their degree of similarity, and adopted two other corpora originally developed for a different yet similar task. Our evaluation shows that TabSim outperforms other table similarity measures on average by app. 7% pp F1-score in a binary similarity classification setting and by app. 1.5% pp in a ranking scenario.

In the domain of data science, the predictive tasks of classification, regression, and imputation of missing values are commonly encountered challenges associated with tabular data. This research endeavors to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) towards addressing these predictive tasks. Despite their proficiency in comprehending natural language, LLMs fall short in dealing with structured tabular data. This limitation stems from their lacking exposure to the intricacies of tabular data during their foundational training. Our research aims to mitigate this gap by compiling a comprehensive corpus of tables annotated with instructions and executing large-scale training of Llama-2 on this enriched dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the practical application of applying the trained model to zero-shot prediction, few-shot prediction, and in-context learning scenarios. Through extensive experiments, our methodology has shown significant improvements over existing benchmarks. These advancements highlight the efficacy of tailoring LLM training to solve table-related problems in data science, thereby establishing a new benchmark in the utilization of LLMs for enhancing tabular intelligence.

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language queries into SQL statements, which is practical as it enables anyone to easily retrieve the desired information from databases. Recently, many existing approaches tackle this problem with Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging their strong capability in understanding user queries and generating corresponding SQL code. Yet, the parametric knowledge in LLMs might be limited to covering all the diverse and domain-specific queries that require grounding in various database schemas, which makes generated SQLs less accurate oftentimes. To tackle this, we propose constructing the knowledge base for text-to-SQL, a foundational source of knowledge, from which we retrieve and generate the necessary knowledge for given queries. In particular, unlike existing approaches that either manually annotate knowledge or generate only a few pieces of knowledge for each query, our knowledge base is comprehensive, which is constructed based on a combination of all the available questions and their associated database schemas along with their relevant knowledge, and can be reused for unseen databases from different datasets and domains. We validate our approach on multiple text-to-SQL datasets, considering both the overlapping and non-overlapping database scenarios, where it outperforms relevant baselines substantially.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Text-to-SQL performance, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts and simplified schemas, leaving a gap in real-world, non-Western applications. We present IndicDB, a multilingual Text-to-SQL benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual semantic parsing across diverse Indic languages. The relational schemas are sourced from open-data platforms, including the National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) and the India Data Portal (IDP), ensuring realistic administrative data complexity. IndicDB comprises 20 databases across 237 tables. To convert denormalized government data into rich relational structures, we employ an iterative three-agent framework (Architect, Auditor, Refiner) to ensure structural rigor and high relational density (11.85 tables per database; join depths up to six). Our pipeline is value-aware, difficulty-calibrated, and join-enforced, generating 15,617 tasks across English, Hindi, and five Indic languages. We evaluate cross-lingual semantic parsing performance of state-of-the-art models (DeepSeek v3.2, MiniMax 2.7, LLaMA 3.3, Qwen3) across seven linguistic variants. Results show a 9.00% performance drop from English to Indic languages, revealing an "Indic Gap" driven by harder schema linking, increased structural ambiguity, and limited external knowledge. IndicDB serves as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual Text-to-SQL. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/multilingualText2Sql-Indic--DDCC/

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers have emerged as an important tool in scaling up modern neural networks by decoupling total trainable parameters from activated parameters in the forward pass for each token. However, sparse MoEs add complexity to training due to (i) new trainable parameters (router weights) that, like all other parameter groups, require hyperparameter (HP) tuning; (ii) new architecture scale dimensions (number of and size of experts) that must be chosen and potentially taken large. To make HP selection cheap and reliable, we propose a new parameterization for transformer models with MoE layers when scaling model width, depth, number of experts, and expert (hidden) size. Our parameterization is justified by a novel dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) analysis. When varying different model dimensions trained at a fixed token budget, we find empirically that our parameterization enables reliable HP transfer across models from 51M to over 2B total parameters. We further take HPs identified from sweeping small models on a short token horizon to train larger models on longer horizons and report performant model behaviors.

Large language models (LLMs) becomes the dominant paradigm for the challenging task of text-to-SQL. LLM-empowered text-to-SQL methods are typically categorized into prompting-based and tuning approaches. Compared to prompting-based methods, benchmarking fine-tuned LLMs for text-to-SQL is important yet under-explored, partially attributed to the prohibitively high computational cost. In this paper, we present DB-GPT-Hub, an open benchmark suite for LLM-empowered text-to-SQL, which primarily focuses on tuning LLMs at large scales. The proposed benchmark consists of: 1. a standardized and comprehensive evaluation of text-to-SQL tasks by fine-tuning medium to large-sized open LLMs; 2. a modularized and easy-to-extend codebase with mainstream LLMs and experimental scenarios supported, which prioritizes fine-tuning methods but can be easily extended to prompt-based setting. Our work investigates the potential gains and the performance boundaries of tuning approaches, compared to prompting approaches and explores optimal solutions tailored to specific scenarios. We hope DB-GPT-Hub, along with these findings, enables further research and broad applications that would otherwise be difficult owing to the absence of a dedicated open benchmark. The project code has been released at https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT-Hub.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have markedly enhanced the interpretation and processing of tabular data, introducing previously unimaginable capabilities. Despite these achievements, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when applied in industrial scenarios, particularly due to the increased complexity of reasoning required with real-world tabular data, underscoring a notable disparity between academic benchmarks and practical applications. To address this discrepancy, we conduct a detailed investigation into the application of tabular data in industrial scenarios and propose a comprehensive and complex benchmark TableBench, including 18 fields within four major categories of table question answering (TableQA) capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce TableLLM, trained on our meticulously constructed training set TableInstruct, achieving comparable performance with GPT-3.5. Massive experiments conducted on TableBench indicate that both open-source and proprietary LLMs still have significant room for improvement to meet real-world demands, where the most advanced model, GPT-4, achieves only a modest score compared to humans.

Tables have gained significant attention in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their complex and flexible structure. Unlike linear text inputs, tables are two-dimensional, encompassing formats that range from well-structured database tables to complex, multi-layered spreadsheets, each with different purposes. This diversity in format and purpose has led to the development of specialized methods and tasks, instead of universal approaches, making navigation of table understanding tasks challenging. To address these challenges, this paper introduces key concepts through a taxonomy of tabular input representations and an introduction of table understanding tasks. We highlight several critical gaps in the field that indicate the need for further research: (1) the predominance of retrieval-focused tasks that require minimal reasoning beyond mathematical and logical operations; (2) significant challenges faced by models when processing complex table structures, large-scale tables, length context, or multi-table scenarios; and (3) the limited generalization of models across different tabular representations and formats.

Deep learning models like Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized various domains, but their parameter-intensive nature hampers deployment in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept utilizes column space and row space of weight matrices, which allows for a substantial reduction in model parameters without compromising performance. Leveraging this paradigm, we achieve parameter-efficient deep learning models.. Our approach applies to both Bottleneck and Attention layers, effectively halving the parameters while incurring only minor performance degradation. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet dataset with ViT and ResNet50 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showcasing competitive performance when compared to traditional models. This approach not only addresses the pressing demand for parameter efficient deep learning solutions but also holds great promise for practical deployment in real-world scenarios.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for challenging benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities in handling complex tabular data. However, existing benchmarks are either based on outdated data setups or focus solely on simple, flat table structures. In this paper, we introduce RealHiTBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of both LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. RealHiTBench also includes a diverse collection of tables with intricate structures, spanning a wide range of task types. Our experimental results, using 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrate that RealHiTBench is indeed a challenging benchmark. Moreover, we also develop TreeThinker, a tree-based pipeline that organizes hierarchical headers into a tree structure for enhanced tabular reasoning, validating the importance of improving LLMs' perception of table hierarchies. We hope that our work will inspire further research on tabular data reasoning and the development of more robust models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cspzyy/RealHiTBench.

Low-rank pre-training and fine-tuning have recently emerged as promising techniques for reducing the computational and storage costs of large neural networks. Training low-rank parameterizations typically relies on conventional optimizers such as heavy ball momentum methods or Adam. In this work, we identify and analyze potential difficulties that these training methods encounter when used to train low-rank parameterizations of weights. In particular, we show that classical momentum methods can struggle to converge to a local optimum due to the geometry of the underlying optimization landscape. To address this, we introduce novel training strategies derived from dynamical low-rank approximation, which explicitly account for the underlying geometric structure. Our approach leverages and combines tools from dynamical low-rank approximation and momentum-based optimization to design optimizers that respect the intrinsic geometry of the parameter space. We validate our methods through numerical experiments, demonstrating faster convergence, and stronger validation metrics at given parameter budgets.

Database knob tuning is a critical challenge in the database community, aiming to optimize knob values to enhance database performance for specific workloads. DBMS often feature hundreds of tunable knobs, posing a significant challenge for DBAs to recommend optimal configurations. Consequently, many machine learning-based tuning methods have been developed to automate this process. Despite the introduction of various optimizers, practical applications have unveiled a new problem: they typically require numerous workload runs to achieve satisfactory performance, a process that is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. This inefficiency largely stems from the optimal configuration often being substantially different from the default setting, necessitating multiple iterations during tuning. Recognizing this, we argue that an effective starting point could significantly reduce redundant exploration in less efficient areas, thereby potentially speeding up the tuning process for the optimizers. Based on this assumption, we introduce LLMTune, a large language model-based configuration generator designed to produce an initial, high-quality configuration for new workloads. These generated configurations can then serve as starting points for various base optimizers, accelerating their tuning processes. To obtain training data for LLMTune's supervised fine-tuning, we have devised a new automatic data generation framework capable of efficiently creating a large number of <workload, configuration> pairs. We have conducted thorough experiments to evaluate LLMTune's effectiveness with different workloads, such as TPC-H and JOB. In comparison to leading methods, LLMTune demonstrates a quicker ability to identify superior configurations. For instance, with the challenging TPC-H workload, our LLMTune achieves a significant 15.6x speed-up ratio in finding the best-performing configurations.

The ubiquity and value of tables as semi-structured data across various domains necessitate advanced methods for understanding their complexity and vast amounts of information. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in advancing the natural language understanding frontier, their application to large-scale tabular data presents significant challenges, specifically regarding table size and complex intricate relationships. Existing works have shown promise with small-scale tables but often flounder when tasked with the complex reasoning required by larger, interconnected tables found in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce "Tree-of-Table", a novel approach designed to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities over large and complex tables. Our method employs Table Condensation and Decomposition to distill and reorganize relevant data into a manageable format, followed by the construction of a hierarchical Table-Tree that facilitates tree-structured reasoning. Through a meticulous Table-Tree Execution process, we systematically unravel the tree-structured reasoning chain to derive the solutions. Experiments across diverse datasets, including WikiTQ, TableFact, FeTaQA, and BIRD, demonstrate that Tree-of-Table sets a new benchmark with superior performance, showcasing remarkable efficiency and generalization capabilities in large-scale table reasoning.

The Maximal Update Parametrization (muP) aims to make the optimal hyperparameters (HPs) of a model independent of its size, allowing them to be swept using a cheap proxy model rather than the full-size target model. We present a new scheme, u-muP, which improves upon muP by combining it with Unit Scaling, a method for designing models that makes them easy to train in low-precision. The two techniques have a natural affinity: muP ensures that the scale of activations is independent of model size, and Unit Scaling ensures that activations, weights and gradients begin training with a scale of one. This synthesis opens the door to a simpler scheme, whose default values are near-optimal. This in turn facilitates a more efficient sweeping strategy, with u-muP models reaching a lower loss than comparable muP models and working out-of-the-box in FP8.

Despite advances in large language model (LLM)-based natural language interfaces for databases, scaling to enterprise-level data catalogs remains an under-explored challenge. Prior works addressing this challenge rely on domain-specific fine-tuning - complicating deployment - and fail to leverage important semantic context contained within database metadata. To address these limitations, we introduce a component-based retrieval architecture that decomposes database schemas and metadata into discrete semantic units, each separately indexed for targeted retrieval. Our approach prioritizes effective table identification while leveraging column-level information, ensuring the total number of retrieved tables remains within a manageable context budget. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains high recall and accuracy, with our system outperforming baselines over massive databases with varying structure and available metadata. Our solution enables practical text-to-SQL systems deployable across diverse enterprise settings without specialized fine-tuning, addressing a critical scalability gap in natural language database interfaces.

Most modern Text2SQL systems prompt large language models (LLMs) with entire schemas -- mostly column information -- alongside the user's question. While effective on small databases, this approach fails on real-world schemas that exceed LLM context limits, even for commercial models. The recent Spider 2.0 benchmark exemplifies this with hundreds of tables and tens of thousands of columns, where existing systems often break. Current mitigations either rely on costly multi-step prompting pipelines or filter columns by ranking them against user's question independently, ignoring inter-column structure. To scale existing systems, we introduce \toolname, an open-source, LLM-efficient schema filtering framework that compacts Text2SQL prompts by (i) ranking columns with a query-aware LLM encoder enriched with values and metadata, (ii) reranking inter-connected columns via a lightweight graph transformer over functional dependencies, and (iii) selecting a connectivity-preserving sub-schema with a Steiner-tree heuristic. Experiments on real datasets show that \toolname achieves near-perfect recall and higher precision than CodeS, SchemaExP, Qwen rerankers, and embedding retrievers, while maintaining sub-second median latency and scaling to schemas with 23,000+ columns. Our source code is available at https://github.com/thanhdath/grast-sql.

Join discovery aims to identify tables from large data repositories that can augment a query table with complementary information, enabling downstream tasks such as data exploration, feature engineering, and business intelligence. Although numerous join discovery methods have been proposed, existing studies rely on method-specific benchmark construction, making reproducible and fair comparison difficult. We present TabJoinBench, a benchmark for evaluating join discovery methods across semantic, relational, and hybrid data lake scenarios. TabJoinBench constructs query-candidate pairs using source-specific validation strategies, systematically introduces structural, representation, and semantic changes through composable perturbations while preserving reliable ground truth. We evaluate representative join discovery methods spanning set-based, feature-based, and learned approaches, together with general-purpose language-model embedding baselines, and publicly release the processed datasets, ground-truth annotations, and generation pipeline to facilitate reproducible evaluation and future research.

Benchmark datasets for table structure recognition (TSR) must be carefully processed to ensure they are annotated consistently. However, even if a dataset's annotations are self-consistent, there may be significant inconsistency across datasets, which can harm the performance of models trained and evaluated on them. In this work, we show that aligning these benchmarksx2014removing both errors and inconsistency between themx2014improves model performance significantly. We demonstrate this through a data-centric approach where we adopt a single model architecture, the Table Transformer (TATR), that we hold fixed throughout. Baseline exact match accuracy for TATR evaluated on the ICDAR-2013 benchmark is 65% when trained on PubTables-1M, 42% when trained on FinTabNet, and 69% combined. After reducing annotation mistakes and inter-dataset inconsistency, performance of TATR evaluated on ICDAR-2013 increases substantially to 75% when trained on PubTables-1M, 65% when trained on FinTabNet, and 81% combined. We show through ablations over the modification steps that canonicalization of the table annotations has a significantly positive effect on performance, while other choices balance necessary trade-offs that arise when deciding a benchmark dataset's final composition. Overall we believe our work has significant implications for benchmark design for TSR and potentially other tasks as well. All dataset processing and training code will be released.

Tabular data is more challenging to generate than text and images, due to its heterogeneous features and much lower sample sizes. On this task, diffusion-based models are the current state-of-the-art (SotA) model class, achieving almost perfect performance on commonly used benchmarks. In this paper, we question the perception of progress for tabular data generation. First, we highlight the limitations of current protocols to evaluate the fidelity of generated data, and advocate for alternative ones. Next, we revisit a simple baseline -- hierarchical mixture models in the form of deep probabilistic circuits (PCs) -- which delivers competitive or superior performance to SotA models for a fraction of the cost. PCs are the generative counterpart of decision forests, and as such can natively handle heterogeneous data as well as deliver tractable probabilistic generation and inference. Finally, in a rigorous empirical analysis we show that the apparent saturation of progress for SotA models is largely due to the use of inadequate metrics. As such, we highlight that there is still much to be done to generate realistic tabular data. Code available at https://github.com/april-tools/tabpc.

Database systems incorporate an ever-growing number of functions in their kernels (a.k.a., database native functions) for scenarios like new application support and business migration. This growth causes an urgent demand for automatic database native function synthesis. While recent advances in LLM-based code generation (e.g., Claude Code) show promise, they are too generic for database-specific development. They often hallucinate or overlook critical context because database function synthesis is inherently complex and error-prone, where synthesizing a single function may involve registering multiple function units, linking internal references, and implementing logic correctly. To this end, we propose DBCooker, an LLM-based system for automatically synthesizing database native functions. It consists of three components. First, the function characterization module aggregates multi-source declarations, identifies function units that require specialized coding, and traces cross-unit dependencies. Second, we design operations to address the main synthesis challenges: (1) a pseudo-code-based coding plan generator that constructs structured implementation skeletons by identifying key elements such as reusable referenced functions; (2) a hybrid fill-in-the-blank model guided by probabilistic priors and component awareness to integrate core logic with reusable routines; and (3) three-level progressive validation, including syntax checking, standards compliance, and LLM-guided semantic verification. Finally, an adaptive orchestration strategy unifies these operations with existing tools and dynamically sequences them via the orchestration history of similar functions. Results show that DBCooker outperforms other methods on SQLite, PostgreSQL, and DuckDB (34.55% higher accuracy on average), and can synthesize new functions absent in the latest SQLite (v3.50).

Large language models deliver strong reasoning and tool-use skills, yet their computational demands make them impractical for edge or cost-sensitive deployments. We present Xmodel-2.5, a 1.3-billion-parameter small language model designed as a drop-in agent core. Training with maximal-update parameterization (μP) allows hyper-parameters tuned on a 20M-parameter proxy to transfer directly to the full model, even under the parameter-tied tie-word-embedding architecture. A 1.4T-token Warmup--Stable--Decay curriculum is used, and we further show that switching from AdamW to Muon during the decay phase improves the 13-task reasoning average by 4.58\,\% while keeping every other hyper-parameter fixed, verifying that early AdamW stability can be paired with late Muon sharpening for better downstream performance. FP8-mixed-precision training balances accuracy and throughput. All checkpoints, recipes, and evaluation code are released under the Apache-2.0 license.https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5 and https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5-history (training checkpoints). Training code and evaluation harness: https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5.

Modern machine learning algorithms are increasingly computationally demanding, requiring specialized hardware and distributed computation to achieve high performance in a reasonable time frame. Many hyperparameter search algorithms have been proposed for improving the efficiency of model selection, however their adaptation to the distributed compute environment is often ad-hoc. We propose Tune, a unified framework for model selection and training that provides a narrow-waist interface between training scripts and search algorithms. We show that this interface meets the requirements for a broad range of hyperparameter search algorithms, allows straightforward scaling of search to large clusters, and simplifies algorithm implementation. We demonstrate the implementation of several state-of-the-art hyperparameter search algorithms in Tune. Tune is available at http://ray.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tune.html.

Training neural networks requires increasing amounts of memory. Parameter sharing can reduce memory and communication costs, but existing methods assume networks have many identical layers and utilize hand-crafted sharing strategies that fail to generalize. We introduce Neural Parameter Allocation Search (NPAS), a novel task where the goal is to train a neural network given an arbitrary, fixed parameter budget. NPAS covers both low-budget regimes, which produce compact networks, as well as a novel high-budget regime, where additional capacity can be added to boost performance without increasing inference FLOPs. To address NPAS, we introduce Shapeshifter Networks (SSNs), which automatically learn where and how to share parameters in a network to support any parameter budget without requiring any changes to the architecture or loss function. NPAS and SSNs provide a complete framework for addressing generalized parameter sharing, and can also be combined with prior work for additional performance gains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using nine network architectures across four diverse tasks, including ImageNet classification and transformers.

While existing generation and unified models excel at general image generation, they struggle with tasks requiring deep reasoning, planning, and precise data-to-visual mapping abilities beyond general scenarios. To push beyond the existing limitations, we introduce a new and challenging task: creative table visualization, requiring the model to generate an infographic that faithfully and aesthetically visualizes the data from a given table. To address this challenge, we propose ShowTable, a pipeline that synergizes MLLMs with diffusion models via a progressive self-correcting process. The MLLM acts as the central orchestrator for reasoning the visual plan and judging visual errors to provide refined instructions, the diffusion execute the commands from MLLM, achieving high-fidelity results. To support this task and our pipeline, we introduce three automated data construction pipelines for training different modules. Furthermore, we introduce TableVisBench, a new benchmark with 800 challenging instances across 5 evaluation dimensions, to assess performance on this task. Experiments demonstrate that our pipeline, instantiated with different models, significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effective multi-modal reasoning, generation, and error correction capabilities.

Tabular data remain the predominant format for real-world applications. Yet, developing effective neural models for tabular data remains challenging due to heterogeneous feature types and complex interactions occurring at multiple scales. Recent advances in tabular in-context learning (ICL), such as TabPFN and TabICL, have achieved state-of-the-art performance comparable to gradient-boosted trees (GBTs) without task-specific fine-tuning. However, current architectures exhibit key limitations: (1) single-scale feature processing that overlooks hierarchical dependencies, (2) dense attention with quadratic scaling in table width, and (3) strictly sequential component processing that prevents iterative representation refinement and cross-component communication. To address these challenges, we introduce Orion-MSP, a tabular ICL architecture featuring three key innovations: (1) multi-scale processing to capture hierarchical feature interactions; (2) block-sparse attention combining windowed, global, and random patterns for scalable efficiency and long-range connectivity; and (3) a Perceiver-style memory enabling safe bidirectional information flow across components. Across diverse benchmarks, Orion-MSP matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance while scaling effectively to high-dimensional tables, establishing a new standard for efficient tabular in-context learning. The model is publicly available at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/Orion-MSP .

Transforming dense, detailed, unstructured text into an interpretable and summarised table, also colloquially known as Text-to-Table generation, is an essential task for information retrieval. Current methods, however, miss out on how and what complex information to extract; they also lack the ability to infer data from the text. In this paper, we introduce a versatile approach, Map&Make, which "dissects" text into propositional atomic statements. This facilitates granular decomposition to extract the latent schema. The schema is then used to populate the tables that capture the qualitative nuances and the quantitative facts in the original text. Our approach is tested against two challenging datasets, Rotowire, renowned for its complex and multi-table schema, and Livesum, which demands numerical aggregation. By carefully identifying and correcting hallucination errors in Rotowire, we aim to achieve a cleaner and more reliable benchmark. We evaluate our method rigorously on a comprehensive suite of comparative and referenceless metrics. Our findings demonstrate significant improvement results across both datasets with better interpretability in Text-to-Table generation. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to superior performance and validate the practicality of our framework in structured summarization tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on large volumes of data excel at various natural language tasks, but they cannot handle tasks requiring knowledge that has not been trained on previously. One solution is to use a retriever that fetches relevant information to expand LLM's knowledge scope. However, existing textual-oriented retrieval-based LLMs are not ideal on structured table data due to diversified data modalities and large table sizes. In this work, we propose OpenTab, an open-domain table reasoning framework powered by LLMs. Overall, OpenTab leverages table retriever to fetch relevant tables and then generates SQL programs to parse the retrieved tables efficiently. Utilizing the intermediate data derived from the SQL executions, it conducts grounded inference to produce accurate response. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that OpenTab significantly outperforms baselines in both open- and closed-domain settings, achieving up to 21.5% higher accuracy. We further run ablation studies to validate the efficacy of our proposed designs of the system.

Benchmarking tabular learning has revealed the benefit of dedicated architectures, pushing the state of the art. But real-world tables often contain string entries, beyond numbers, and these settings have been understudied due to a lack of a solid benchmarking suite. They lead to new research questions: Are dedicated learners needed, with end-to-end modeling of strings and numbers? Or does it suffice to encode strings as numbers, as with a categorical encoding? And if so, do the resulting tables resemble numerical tabular data, calling for the same learners? To enable these studies, we contribute STRABLE, a benchmarking corpus of 108 tables, all real-world learning problems with strings and numbers across diverse application fields. We run the first large-scale empirical study of tabular learning with strings, evaluating 445 pipelines. These pipelines span end-to-end architectures and modular pipelines, where strings are first encoded, then post-processed, and finally passed to a tabular learner. We find that, because most tables in the wild are categorical-dominant, advanced tabular learners paired with simple string embeddings achieve good predictions at low computational cost. On free-text-dominant tables, large LLM encoders become competitive. Their performance also appears sensitive to post-processing, with differences across LLM families. Finally, we show that STRABLE is a good set of tables to study "string tabular" learning as it leads to generalizable pipeline rankings that are close to the oracle rankings. We thus establish STRABLE as a foundation for research on tabular learning with strings, an important yet understudied area.

Data teams at frontier AI companies routinely train small proxy models to make critical decisions about pretraining data recipes for full-scale training runs. However, the community has a limited understanding of whether and when conclusions drawn from small-scale experiments reliably transfer to full-scale model training. In this work, we uncover a subtle yet critical issue in the standard experimental protocol for data recipe assessment: the use of identical small-scale model training configurations across all data recipes in the name of "fair" comparison. We show that the experiment conclusions about data quality can flip with even minor adjustments to training hyperparameters, as the optimal training configuration is inherently data-dependent. Moreover, this fixed-configuration protocol diverges from full-scale model development pipelines, where hyperparameter optimization is a standard step. Consequently, we posit that the objective of data recipe assessment should be to identify the recipe that yields the best performance under data-specific tuning. To mitigate the high cost of hyperparameter tuning, we introduce a simple patch to the evaluation protocol: using reduced learning rates for proxy model training. We show that this approach yields relative performance that strongly correlates with that of fully tuned large-scale LLM pretraining runs. Theoretically, we prove that for random-feature models, this approach preserves the ordering of datasets according to their optimal achievable loss. Empirically, we validate this approach across 23 data recipes covering four critical dimensions of data curation, demonstrating dramatic improvements in the reliability of small-scale experiments.

While advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved the quality of synthetic text data in recent years, synthesizing tabular data has received relatively less attention. We address this disparity with Tabby, a simple but powerful post-training modification to the standard Transformer language model architecture, enabling its use for tabular dataset synthesis. Tabby enables the representation of differences across columns using Gated Mixture-of-Experts, with column-specific sets of parameters. Empirically, Tabby results in data quality near or equal to that of real data. By pairing our novel LLM table training technique, Plain, with Tabby, we observe up to a 44% improvement in quality over previous methods. We also show that Tabby extends beyond tables to more general structured data, reaching parity with real data on a nested JSON dataset as well.

Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.

Efficient querying and analysis of large tabular datasets remain significant challenges, especially for users without expertise in programming languages like SQL. Text-to-SQL approaches have shown promising performance on benchmark data; however, they inherit SQL's drawbacks, including inefficiency with large datasets and limited support for complex data analyses beyond basic querying. We propose a novel framework that transforms natural language queries into query plans. Our solution is implemented outside traditional databases, allowing us to support classical SQL commands while avoiding SQL's inherent limitations. Additionally, we enable complex analytical functions, such as principal component analysis and anomaly detection, providing greater flexibility and extensibility than traditional SQL capabilities. We leverage LLMs to iteratively interpret queries and construct operation sequences, addressing computational complexity by incrementally building solutions. By executing operations directly on the data, we overcome context length limitations without requiring the entire dataset to be processed by the model. We validate our framework through experiments on both standard databases and large scientific tables, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling extensive datasets and performing sophisticated data analyses.

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly accelerating largely thanks to their integration with external tools. Querying databases is among the most effective of these integrations, enabling LLMs to access private or continually updating data. While Function Calling is the most common method for interfacing external tools to LLMs, its application to database querying as a tool has been underexplored. We propose a tool definition for database querying that unifies accessing data with search queries, filters, or a combination both, as well as transforming results with aggregation and groupby operators. To evaluate its effectiveness, we conduct a study with 8 LLMs spanning 5 model families. We present a novel pipeline adapting the Gorilla LLM framework to create synthetic database schemas and queries. We primarily evaluate the models with the Exact Match of predicted and ground truth query APIs. Among the models tested, Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves the highest performance with an Exact Match score of 74.3%, followed by GPT-4o mini at 73.7%, and GPT-4o at 71.8%. We further breakdown these results per API component utilized and across synthetic use cases. We find that LLMs are highly effective at utilizing operators on boolean properties, but struggle with text property filters. Across use cases we find robust results with the higher performing models such as GPT-4o, but significant performance variance across use cases from lower performing models. We additionally conduct ablation studies exploring the impact of parallel tool calling, adding a rationale as an argument of the tool call, using a separate tool per database collection, and tool calling with structured outputs. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of enabling LLMs to query databases with Function Calling. We have open-sourced our experimental code and results at github.com/weaviate/gorilla.