TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data

(research.google)

80 points | by brandonb 13 hours ago

4 comments

  • woadwarrior01 11 hours ago
    In hindsight, the Prior Labs exit to SAP couldn't have been timed better.
  • hodgehog11 13 hours ago
    On the one hand, this is impressive. TabPFN was already state of the art and is seriously shaking up Bayesian prediction for tabular data (which is almost everything).

    On the other hand, perhaps it is just me, but I do not feel that this is an acceptable form of benchmark reporting in this domain. TabArena actually has multiple metrics, since ELO does not properly quantify the degree of improvement. The fact that these are not displayed here should give pause. Also the results section in the GitHub is a dumpster fire.

    • Eridrus 12 hours ago
      GitHub Repo: Please see the results folder

      Results folder: Here's some undocumented parquet files

      Definitely feels like they're hiding the ball lol.

      If they had good benchmarks they'd talk about them.

      Not comparing to tuned xgboost is also a warning sign.

      • nok22kon 7 hours ago
        wouldn't xgboost be covered under autogluon? not perfect, but not missing either
  • actusual 12 hours ago
    150,000 rows of data, where will I store it all?!
    • estetlinus 5 hours ago
      Big Data is terrifying and only solvable with opaque deep learning
    • piokoch 5 hours ago
      You don't need to. Just sample 1% of data, let the model do the feature engineering, ask model model to replicate everything in Pandas (or R, or whatever else), so you can run it for a full dataset.
    • nojito 11 hours ago
      The biggest misconception that people have when modeling using tabular data is that more data = better model.
  • kingjimmy 13 hours ago
    interesting to see this from Google after the SAP acquisition of Prior Labs.