Daily Papers

Credit exposure in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is often implicit and token-mediated, creating a dense web of inter-protocol dependencies. Thus, a shock to one token may result in significant and uncontrolled contagion effects. As the DeFi ecosystem becomes increasingly linked with traditional financial infrastructure through instruments, such as stablecoins, the risk posed by this dynamic demands more powerful quantification tools. We introduce DeXposure-FM, the first time-series, graph foundation model for measuring and forecasting inter-protocol credit exposure on DeFi networks, to the best of our knowledge. Employing a graph-tabular encoder, with pre-trained weight initialization, and multiple task-specific heads, DeXposure-FM is trained on the DeXposure dataset that has 43.7 million data entries, across 4,300+ protocols on 602 blockchains, covering 24,300+ unique tokens. The training is operationalized for credit-exposure forecasting, predicting the joint dynamics of (1) protocol-level flows, and (2) the topology and weights of credit-exposure links. The DeXposure-FM is empirically validated on two machine learning benchmarks; it consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, including a graph foundation model and temporal graph neural networks. DeXposure-FM further produces financial economics tools that support macroprudential monitoring and scenario-based DeFi stress testing, by enabling protocol-level systemic-importance scores, sector-level spillover and concentration measures via a forecast-then-measure pipeline. Empirical verification fully supports our financial economics tools. The model and code have been publicly available. Model: https://huggingface.co/EVIEHub/DeXposure-FM. Code: https://github.com/EVIEHub/DeXposure-FM.

Tabular encoders are usually evaluated inside task-specific end-to-end pipelines, so models from different training paradigms are difficult to compare directly even when they operate on similar tabular signals. We introduce TRL-Bench, a multi-granular tabular representation learning (TRL) benchmark that standardizes cross-paradigm representation-level evaluation: each encoder exports row-, column-, or table embeddings through its supported wrapper, and shared lightweight heads probe them across three suites: TRL-CTbench (column/table), TRL-Rbench (row), and TRL-DLTE (compositional Data-Lake Table Enrichment spanning all three granularities). To support this standardized setting, we release curated benchmark assets and task reformulations, including 50 OpenML tables with 123 verified targets, 16 row-pair linkage rewrites, and a 47,772-table DLTE lake derived from 1,379 parent tables. Across 20 models and 16 tasks, TRL-Bench shows that once downstream conditions are standardized, encoder quality is capability-specific rather than captured by a single leaderboard. In TRL-CTbench, generic text encoders often lead on tasks with strong surface-text signal, while tabular specialists win where their pretraining objective aligns with the task. In TRL-Rbench, within-table prediction and cross-table linkage favor different training regimes, with atomic linkage performance correlating strongly with the row-matching stage of DLTE pipelines. In TRL-DLTE, the strongest pipelines combine capability-matched specialists rather than reuse a single encoder, and top end-to-end quality depends on non-additive compositional fit rather than per-stage marginal rank alone. TRL-Bench provides a common protocol for measuring reusable signal in exported tabular representations under shared downstream conditions. Code and data: https://github.com/LOGO-CUHKSZ/TRL-Bench

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.

Heterogeneous tabular data poses unique challenges in generative modelling due to its fundamentally different underlying data structure compared to homogeneous modalities, such as images and text. Although previous research has sought to adapt the successes of generative modelling in homogeneous modalities to the tabular domain, defining an effective generator for tabular data remains an open problem. One major reason is that the evaluation criteria inherited from other modalities often fail to adequately assess whether tabular generative models effectively capture or utilise the unique structural information encoded in tabular data. In this paper, we carefully examine the limitations of the prevailing evaluation framework and introduce TabStruct, a novel evaluation benchmark that positions structural fidelity as a core evaluation dimension. Specifically, TabStruct evaluates the alignment of causal structures in real and synthetic data, providing a direct measure of how effectively tabular generative models learn the structure of tabular data. Through extensive experiments using generators from eight categories on seven datasets with expert-validated causal graphical structures, we show that structural fidelity offers a task-independent, domain-agnostic evaluation dimension. Our findings highlight the importance of tabular data structure and offer practical guidance for developing more effective and robust tabular generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

All tables can be represented as grids. Based on this observation, we propose GridFormer, a novel approach for interpreting unconstrained table structures by predicting the vertex and edge of a grid. First, we propose a flexible table representation in the form of an MXN grid. In this representation, the vertexes and edges of the grid store the localization and adjacency information of the table. Then, we introduce a DETR-style table structure recognizer to efficiently predict this multi-objective information of the grid in a single shot. Specifically, given a set of learned row and column queries, the recognizer directly outputs the vertexes and edges information of the corresponding rows and columns. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks which include wired, wireless, multi-merge-cell, oriented, and distorted tables demonstrate the competitive performance of our model over other methods.

Tabular datasets are ubiquitous in data science applications. Given their importance, it seems natural to apply state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms in order to fully unlock their potential. Here we propose neural network models that represent tabular time series that can optionally leverage their hierarchical structure. This results in two architectures for tabular time series: one for learning representations that is analogous to BERT and can be pre-trained end-to-end and used in downstream tasks, and one that is akin to GPT and can be used for generation of realistic synthetic tabular sequences. We demonstrate our models on two datasets: a synthetic credit card transaction dataset, where the learned representations are used for fraud detection and synthetic data generation, and on a real pollution dataset, where the learned encodings are used to predict atmospheric pollutant concentrations. Code and data are available at https://github.com/IBM/TabFormer.

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.

Tabular neural network (NN) has attracted remarkable attentions and its recent advances have gradually narrowed the performance gap with respect to tree-based models on many public datasets. While the mainstreams focus on calibrating NN to fit tabular data, we emphasize the importance of homogeneous embeddings and alternately concentrate on regularizing tabular inputs through supervised pretraining. Specifically, we extend a recent work (DeepTLF) and utilize the structure of pretrained tree ensembles to transform raw variables into a single vector (T2V), or an array of tokens (T2T). Without loss of space efficiency, these binarized embeddings can be consumed by canonical tabular NN with fully-connected or attention-based building blocks. Through quantitative experiments on 88 OpenML datasets with binary classification task, we validated that the proposed tree-regularized representation not only tapers the difference with respect to tree-based models, but also achieves on-par and better performance when compared with advanced NN models. Most importantly, it possesses better robustness and can be easily scaled and generalized as standalone encoder for tabular modality. Codes: https://github.com/milanlx/tree-regularized-embedding.

In recent years, exploiting the domain-specific underlying structure of data and its generative factors for representation learning has shown success in various use-case agnostic applications. However, the diversity and complexity of tabular data have made it challenging to represent these structures in a latent space through multi-dimensional vectors. We design an autoencoder-based framework for building general purpose embeddings, we assess the performance of different autoencoder architectures, and show simpler models outperform complex ones in embedding highly complex tabular data. We apply our framework to produce plug-and-play, rich, and anonymized embeddings representing AWS customers for usage in any model, saving up to 45% of development time, and observe significant improvements in downstream models. Moreover, we propose a significant improvement to the calculation of reconstruction loss for multi-layer contractive autoencoders (CAE) by calculating the Jacobian of the entire encoder leading to a 15% improvement in reconstruction quality when compared to a stacked CAE.

Important information that relates to a specific topic in a document is often organized in tabular format to assist readers with information retrieval and comparison, which may be difficult to provide in natural language. However, tabular data in unstructured digital documents, e.g., Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, are difficult to parse into structured machine-readable format, due to complexity and diversity in their structure and style. To facilitate image-based table recognition with deep learning, we develop the largest publicly available table recognition dataset PubTabNet (https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubTabNet), containing 568k table images with corresponding structured HTML representation. PubTabNet is automatically generated by matching the XML and PDF representations of the scientific articles in PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMCOA). We also propose a novel attention-based encoder-dual-decoder (EDD) architecture that converts images of tables into HTML code. The model has a structure decoder which reconstructs the table structure and helps the cell decoder to recognize cell content. In addition, we propose a new Tree-Edit-Distance-based Similarity (TEDS) metric for table recognition, which more appropriately captures multi-hop cell misalignment and OCR errors than the pre-established metric. The experiments demonstrate that the EDD model can accurately recognize complex tables solely relying on the image representation, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 9.7% absolute TEDS score.

The Transformer architecture has become a dominant choice in many domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision. Yet, it has not achieved competitive performance on popular leaderboards of graph-level prediction compared to mainstream GNN variants. Therefore, it remains a mystery how Transformers could perform well for graph representation learning. In this paper, we solve this mystery by presenting Graphormer, which is built upon the standard Transformer architecture, and could attain excellent results on a broad range of graph representation learning tasks, especially on the recent OGB Large-Scale Challenge. Our key insight to utilizing Transformer in the graph is the necessity of effectively encoding the structural information of a graph into the model. To this end, we propose several simple yet effective structural encoding methods to help Graphormer better model graph-structured data. Besides, we mathematically characterize the expressive power of Graphormer and exhibit that with our ways of encoding the structural information of graphs, many popular GNN variants could be covered as the special cases of Graphormer.

Although graph-based learning has attracted a lot of attention, graph representation learning is still a challenging task whose resolution may impact key application fields such as chemistry or biology. To this end, we introduce GRALE, a novel graph autoencoder that encodes and decodes graphs of varying sizes into a shared embedding space. GRALE is trained using an Optimal Transport-inspired loss that compares the original and reconstructed graphs and leverages a differentiable node matching module, which is trained jointly with the encoder and decoder. The proposed attention-based architecture relies on Evoformer, the core component of AlphaFold, which we extend to support both graph encoding and decoding. We show, in numerical experiments on simulated and molecular data, that GRALE enables a highly general form of pre-training, applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks, from classification and regression to more complex tasks such as graph interpolation, editing, matching, and prediction.

The task of table structure recognition aims to recognize the internal structure of a table, which is a key step to make machines understand tables. Currently, there are lots of studies on this task for different file formats such as ASCII text and HTML. It also attracts lots of attention to recognize the table structures in PDF files. However, it is hard for the existing methods to accurately recognize the structure of complicated tables in PDF files. The complicated tables contain spanning cells which occupy at least two columns or rows. To address the issue, we propose a novel graph neural network for recognizing the table structure in PDF files, named GraphTSR. Specifically, it takes table cells as input, and then recognizes the table structures by predicting relations among cells. Moreover, to evaluate the task better, we construct a large-scale table structure recognition dataset from scientific papers, named SciTSR, which contains 15,000 tables from PDF files and their corresponding structure labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model is highly effective for complicated tables and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines over a benchmark dataset and our new constructed dataset.

Graphs are a powerful tool for representing and analyzing complex relationships in real-world applications such as social networks, recommender systems, and computational finance. Reasoning on graphs is essential for drawing inferences about the relationships between entities in a complex system, and to identify hidden patterns and trends. Despite the remarkable progress in automated reasoning with natural text, reasoning on graphs with large language models (LLMs) remains an understudied problem. In this work, we perform the first comprehensive study of encoding graph-structured data as text for consumption by LLMs. We show that LLM performance on graph reasoning tasks varies on three fundamental levels: (1) the graph encoding method, (2) the nature of the graph task itself, and (3) interestingly, the very structure of the graph considered. These novel results provide valuable insight on strategies for encoding graphs as text. Using these insights we illustrate how the correct choice of encoders can boost performance on graph reasoning tasks inside LLMs by 4.8% to 61.8%, depending on the task.

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success across many domains, it has historically underperformed on tabular learning tasks, which remain dominated by gradient boosting decision trees (GBDTs). However, recent advancements are paving the way for Tabular Foundation Models, which can leverage real-world knowledge and generalize across diverse datasets, particularly when the data contains free-text. Although incorporating language model capabilities into tabular tasks has been explored, most existing methods utilize static, target-agnostic textual representations, limiting their effectiveness. We introduce TabSTAR: a Foundation Tabular Model with Semantically Target-Aware Representations. TabSTAR is designed to enable transfer learning on tabular data with textual features, with an architecture free of dataset-specific parameters. It unfreezes a pretrained text encoder and takes as input target tokens, which provide the model with the context needed to learn task-specific embeddings. TabSTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance for both medium- and large-sized datasets across known benchmarks of classification tasks with text features, and its pretraining phase exhibits scaling laws in the number of datasets, offering a pathway for further performance improvements.

Recent advances in tabular data generation have greatly enhanced synthetic data quality. However, extending diffusion models to tabular data is challenging due to the intricately varied distributions and a blend of data types of tabular data. This paper introduces Tabsyn, a methodology that synthesizes tabular data by leveraging a diffusion model within a variational autoencoder (VAE) crafted latent space. The key advantages of the proposed Tabsyn include (1) Generality: the ability to handle a broad spectrum of data types by converting them into a single unified space and explicitly capture inter-column relations; (2) Quality: optimizing the distribution of latent embeddings to enhance the subsequent training of diffusion models, which helps generate high-quality synthetic data, (3) Speed: much fewer number of reverse steps and faster synthesis speed than existing diffusion-based methods. Extensive experiments on six datasets with five metrics demonstrate that Tabsyn outperforms existing methods. Specifically, it reduces the error rates by 86% and 67% for column-wise distribution and pair-wise column correlation estimations compared with the most competitive baselines.

This paper addresses unsupervised representation learning on tabular data containing multiple views generated by distinct sources of measurement. Traditional methods, which tackle this problem using the multi-view framework, are constrained by predefined assumptions that assume feature sets share the same information and representations should learn globally shared factors. However, this assumption is not always valid for real-world tabular datasets with complex dependencies between feature sets, resulting in localized information that is harder to learn. To overcome this limitation, we propose a data-driven approach that learns feature set dependencies by representing feature sets as graph nodes and their relationships as learnable edges. Furthermore, we introduce LEGATO, a novel hierarchical graph autoencoder that learns a smaller, latent graph to aggregate information from multiple views dynamically. This approach results in latent graph components that specialize in capturing localized information from different regions of the input, leading to superior downstream performance.

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.

Tabular data poses unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous feature types, lack of spatial structure, and often limited sample sizes. We propose TabNSA, a novel deep learning framework that integrates Native Sparse Attention (NSA) with a TabMixer backbone to efficiently model tabular data. TabNSA tackles computational and representational challenges by dynamically focusing on relevant feature subsets per instance. The NSA module employs a hierarchical sparse attention mechanism, including token compression, selective preservation, and localized sliding windows, to significantly reduce the quadratic complexity of standard attention operations while addressing feature heterogeneity. Complementing this, the TabMixer backbone captures complex, non-linear dependencies through parallel multilayer perceptron (MLP) branches with independent parameters. These modules are synergistically combined via element-wise summation and mean pooling, enabling TabNSA to model both global context and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments across supervised and transfer learning settings show that TabNSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models. Furthermore, by augmenting TabNSA with a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), we enable it to effectively address Few-Shot Learning challenges through language-guided generalization on diverse tabular benchmarks. Code available on: https://github.com/aseslamian/TabNSA

Can we model non-Euclidean graphs as pure language or even Euclidean vectors while retaining their inherent information? The non-Euclidean property have posed a long term challenge in graph modeling. Despite recent GNN and Graphformer efforts encoding graphs as Euclidean vectors, recovering original graph from the vectors remains a challenge. We introduce GraphsGPT, featuring a Graph2Seq encoder that transforms non-Euclidean graphs into learnable graph words in a Euclidean space, along with a GraphGPT decoder that reconstructs the original graph from graph words to ensure information equivalence. We pretrain GraphsGPT on 100M molecules and yield some interesting findings: (1) Pretrained Graph2Seq excels in graph representation learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on 8/9 graph classification and regression tasks. (2) Pretrained GraphGPT serves as a strong graph generator, demonstrated by its ability to perform both unconditional and conditional graph generation. (3) Graph2Seq+GraphGPT enables effective graph mixup in the Euclidean space, overcoming previously known non-Euclidean challenge. (4) Our proposed novel edge-centric GPT pretraining task is effective in graph fields, underscoring its success in both representation and generation.

Tabular data, structured as rows and columns, is among the most prevalent data types in machine learning classification and regression applications. Models for learning from tabular data have continuously evolved, with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) recently demonstrating promising results through their capability of representation learning. In this survey, we systematically introduce the field of tabular representation learning, covering the background, challenges, and benchmarks, along with the pros and cons of using DNNs. We organize existing methods into three main categories according to their generalization capabilities: specialized, transferable, and general models. Specialized models focus on tasks where training and evaluation occur within the same data distribution. We introduce a hierarchical taxonomy for specialized models based on the key aspects of tabular data -- features, samples, and objectives -- and delve into detailed strategies for obtaining high-quality feature- and sample-level representations. Transferable models are pre-trained on one or more datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on downstream tasks, leveraging knowledge acquired from homogeneous or heterogeneous sources, or even cross-modalities such as vision and language. General models, also known as tabular foundation models, extend this concept further, allowing direct application to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. We group these general models based on the strategies used to adapt across heterogeneous datasets. Additionally, we explore ensemble methods, which integrate the strengths of multiple tabular models. Finally, we discuss representative extensions of tabular learning, including open-environment tabular machine learning, multimodal learning with tabular data, and tabular understanding. More information can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/LAMDA-Tabular/Tabular-Survey.

Language models pretrained on large collections of tabular data have demonstrated their effectiveness in several downstream tasks. However, many of these models do not take into account the row/column permutation invariances, hierarchical structure, etc. that exist in tabular data. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HYTREL, a tabular language model, that captures the permutation invariances and three more structural properties of tabular data by using hypergraphs - where the table cells make up the nodes and the cells occurring jointly together in each row, column, and the entire table are used to form three different types of hyperedges. We show that HYTREL is maximally invariant under certain conditions for tabular data, i.e., two tables obtain the same representations via HYTREL iff the two tables are identical up to permutations. Our empirical results demonstrate that HYTREL consistently outperforms other competitive baselines on four downstream tasks with minimal pretraining, illustrating the advantages of incorporating the inductive biases associated with tabular data into the representations. Finally, our qualitative analyses showcase that HYTREL can assimilate the table structures to generate robust representations for the cells, rows, columns, and the entire table.

Foundation models have established unified representations for natural language processing, yet this paradigm remains largely unexplored for tabular data. Existing methods face fundamental limitations: LLM-based approaches lack retrieval-compatible vector outputs, whereas text embedding models often fail to capture tabular structure and numerical semantics. To bridge this gap, we first introduce the Tabular Embedding Benchmark (TabBench), a comprehensive suite designed to evaluate the tabular understanding capability of embedding models. We then propose TabEmbed, the first generalist embedding model that unifies tabular classification and retrieval within a shared embedding space. By reformulating diverse tabular tasks as semantic matching problems, TabEmbed leverages large-scale contrastive learning with positive-aware hard negative mining to discern fine-grained structural and numerical nuances. Experimental results on TabBench demonstrate that TabEmbed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models, establishing a new baseline for universal tabular representation learning. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed and https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiangminjie27/TabBench.

Tabular data, ubiquitous and rich in informational value, is an increasing focus for deep representation learning, yet progress is hindered by studies centered on single tables or isolated databases, which limits model capabilities due to data scale. While collaborative learning approaches such as federated learning, transfer learning, split learning, and tabular foundation models aim to learn from multiple correlated databases, they are challenged by a scarcity of real-world interconnected tabular resources. Current data lakes and corpora largely consist of isolated databases lacking defined inter-database correlations. To overcome this, we introduce WikiDBGraph, a large-scale graph of 100,000 real-world tabular databases from WikiData, interconnected by 17 million edges and characterized by 13 node and 12 edge properties derived from its database schema and data distribution. WikiDBGraph's weighted edges identify both instance- and feature-overlapped databases. Experiments on these newly identified databases confirm that collaborative learning yields superior performance, thereby offering considerable promise for structured foundation model training while also exposing key challenges and future directions for learning from interconnected tabular data.

Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations. Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability. In this work, we propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer, where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biases. TableFormer is (1) strictly invariant to row and column orders, and, (2) could understand tables better due to its tabular inductive biases. Our evaluations showed that TableFormer outperforms strong baselines in all settings on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQA, especially when facing answer-invariant row and column order perturbations (6% improvement over the best baseline), because previous SOTA models' performance drops by 4% - 6% when facing such perturbations while TableFormer is not affected.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in employing neural networks for graph generation, a fundamental statistical learning problem with critical applications like molecule design and community analysis. However, most approaches encounter significant limitations when generating large-scale graphs. This is due to their requirement to output the full adjacency matrices whose size grows quadratically with the number of nodes. In response to this challenge, we introduce a new, simple, and scalable graph representation named gap encoded edge list (GEEL) that has a small representation size that aligns with the number of edges. In addition, GEEL significantly reduces the vocabulary size by incorporating the gap encoding and bandwidth restriction schemes. GEEL can be autoregressively generated with the incorporation of node positional encoding, and we further extend GEEL to deal with attributed graphs by designing a new grammar. Our findings reveal that the adoption of this compact representation not only enhances scalability but also bolsters performance by simplifying the graph generation process. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across ten non-attributed and two molecular graph generation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of GEEL.

Synthetic data generation for tabular datasets must balance fidelity, efficiency, and versatility to meet the demands of real-world applications. We introduce the Tabular Auto-Regressive Generative Network (TabularARGN), a flexible framework designed to handle mixed-type, multivariate, and sequential datasets. By training on all possible conditional probabilities, TabularARGN supports advanced features such as fairness-aware generation, imputation, and conditional generation on any subset of columns. The framework achieves state-of-the-art synthetic data quality while significantly reducing training and inference times, making it ideal for large-scale datasets with diverse structures. Evaluated across established benchmarks, including realistic datasets with complex relationships, TabularARGN demonstrates its capability to synthesize high-quality data efficiently. By unifying flexibility and performance, this framework paves the way for practical synthetic data generation across industries.

We propose a recipe on how to build a general, powerful, scalable (GPS) graph Transformer with linear complexity and state-of-the-art results on a diverse set of benchmarks. Graph Transformers (GTs) have gained popularity in the field of graph representation learning with a variety of recent publications but they lack a common foundation about what constitutes a good positional or structural encoding, and what differentiates them. In this paper, we summarize the different types of encodings with a clearer definition and categorize them as being local, global or relative. The prior GTs are constrained to small graphs with a few hundred nodes, here we propose the first architecture with a complexity linear in the number of nodes and edges O(N+E) by decoupling the local real-edge aggregation from the fully-connected Transformer. We argue that this decoupling does not negatively affect the expressivity, with our architecture being a universal function approximator on graphs. Our GPS recipe consists of choosing 3 main ingredients: (i) positional/structural encoding, (ii) local message-passing mechanism, and (iii) global attention mechanism. We provide a modular framework GraphGPS that supports multiple types of encodings and that provides efficiency and scalability both in small and large graphs. We test our architecture on 16 benchmarks and show highly competitive results in all of them, show-casing the empirical benefits gained by the modularity and the combination of different strategies.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with numerical node features and graph structure as inputs have demonstrated superior performance on various supervised learning tasks with graph data. However the numerical node features utilized by GNNs are commonly extracted from raw data which is of text or tabular (numeric/categorical) type in most real-world applications. The best models for such data types in most standard supervised learning settings with IID (non-graph) data are not simple neural network layers and thus are not easily incorporated into a GNN. Here we propose a robust stacking framework that fuses graph-aware propagation with arbitrary models intended for IID data, which are ensembled and stacked in multiple layers. Our layer-wise framework leverages bagging and stacking strategies to enjoy strong generalization, in a manner which effectively mitigates label leakage and overfitting. Across a variety of graph datasets with tabular/text node features, our method achieves comparable or superior performance relative to both tabular/text and graph neural network models, as well as existing state-of-the-art hybrid strategies that combine the two.

Data used for analytics and machine learning often take the form of tables with categorical entries. We introduce a family of lossless compression algorithms for such data that proceed in four steps: (i) Estimate latent variables associated to rows and columns; (ii) Partition the table in blocks according to the row/column latents; (iii) Apply a sequential (e.g. Lempel-Ziv) coder to each of the blocks; (iv) Append a compressed encoding of the latents. We evaluate it on several benchmark datasets, and study optimal compression in a probabilistic model for that tabular data, whereby latent values are independent and table entries are conditionally independent given the latent values. We prove that the model has a well defined entropy rate and satisfies an asymptotic equipartition property. We also prove that classical compression schemes such as Lempel-Ziv and finite-state encoders do not achieve this rate. On the other hand, the latent estimation strategy outlined above achieves the optimal rate.

This work aims to tackle the challenging heterogeneous graph encoding problem in the text-to-SQL task. Previous methods are typically node-centric and merely utilize different weight matrices to parameterize edge types, which 1) ignore the rich semantics embedded in the topological structure of edges, and 2) fail to distinguish local and non-local relations for each node. To this end, we propose a Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL (LGESQL) model to mine the underlying relational features without constructing meta-paths. By virtue of the line graph, messages propagate more efficiently through not only connections between nodes, but also the topology of directed edges. Furthermore, both local and non-local relations are integrated distinctively during the graph iteration. We also design an auxiliary task called graph pruning to improve the discriminative capability of the encoder. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results (62.8% with Glove, 72.0% with Electra) on the cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing.

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.

Deep learning architectures for supervised learning on tabular data range from simple multilayer perceptrons (MLP) to sophisticated Transformers and retrieval-augmented methods. This study highlights a major, yet so far overlooked opportunity for designing substantially better MLP-based tabular architectures. Namely, our new model TabM relies on efficient ensembling, where one TabM efficiently imitates an ensemble of MLPs and produces multiple predictions per object. Compared to a traditional deep ensemble, in TabM, the underlying implicit MLPs are trained simultaneously, and (by default) share most of their parameters, which results in significantly better performance and efficiency. Using TabM as a new baseline, we perform a large-scale evaluation of tabular DL architectures on public benchmarks in terms of both task performance and efficiency, which renders the landscape of tabular DL in a new light. Generally, we show that MLPs, including TabM, form a line of stronger and more practical models compared to attention- and retrieval-based architectures. In particular, we find that TabM demonstrates the best performance among tabular DL models. Then, we conduct an empirical analysis on the ensemble-like nature of TabM. We observe that the multiple predictions of TabM are weak individually, but powerful collectively. Overall, our work brings an impactful technique to tabular DL and advances the performance-efficiency trade-off with TabM -- a simple and powerful baseline for researchers and practitioners.

Structural and Positional Encodings can significantly improve the performance of Graph Neural Networks in downstream tasks. Recent literature has begun to systematically investigate differences in the structural properties that these approaches encode, as well as performance trade-offs between them. However, the question of which structural properties yield the most effective encoding remains open. In this paper, we investigate this question from a geometric perspective. We propose a novel structural encoding based on discrete Ricci curvature (Local Curvature Profiles, short LCP) and show that it significantly outperforms existing encoding approaches. We further show that combining local structural encodings, such as LCP, with global positional encodings improves downstream performance, suggesting that they capture complementary geometric information. Finally, we compare different encoding types with (curvature-based) rewiring techniques. Rewiring has recently received a surge of interest due to its ability to improve the performance of Graph Neural Networks by mitigating over-smoothing and over-squashing effects. Our results suggest that utilizing curvature information for structural encodings delivers significantly larger performance increases than rewiring.

We propose TabTransformer, a novel deep tabular data modeling architecture for supervised and semi-supervised learning. The TabTransformer is built upon self-attention based Transformers. The Transformer layers transform the embeddings of categorical features into robust contextual embeddings to achieve higher prediction accuracy. Through extensive experiments on fifteen publicly available datasets, we show that the TabTransformer outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for tabular data by at least 1.0% on mean AUC, and matches the performance of tree-based ensemble models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the contextual embeddings learned from TabTransformer are highly robust against both missing and noisy data features, and provide better interpretability. Lastly, for the semi-supervised setting we develop an unsupervised pre-training procedure to learn data-driven contextual embeddings, resulting in an average 2.1% AUC lift over the state-of-the-art methods.

Learning on tabular data underpins numerous real-world applications. Despite considerable efforts in developing effective learning models for tabular data, current transferable tabular models remain in their infancy, limited by either the lack of support for direct instruction following in new tasks or the neglect of acquiring foundational knowledge and capabilities from diverse tabular datasets. In this paper, we propose Tabular Foundation Models (TabFMs) to overcome these limitations. TabFMs harness the potential of generative tabular learning, employing a pre-trained large language model (LLM) as the base model and fine-tuning it using purpose-designed objectives on an extensive range of tabular datasets. This approach endows TabFMs with a profound understanding and universal capabilities essential for learning on tabular data. Our evaluations underscore TabFM's effectiveness: not only does it significantly excel in instruction-following tasks like zero-shot and in-context inference, but it also showcases performance that approaches, and in instances, even transcends, the renowned yet mysterious closed-source LLMs like GPT-4. Furthermore, when fine-tuning with scarce data, our model achieves remarkable efficiency and maintains competitive performance with abundant training data. Finally, while our results are promising, we also delve into TabFM's limitations and potential opportunities, aiming to stimulate and expedite future research on developing more potent TabFMs.

Tables organize valuable content in a concise and compact representation. This content is extremely valuable for systems such as search engines, Knowledge Graph's, etc, since they enhance their predictive capabilities. Unfortunately, tables come in a large variety of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, they can have complex column/row-header configurations, multiline rows, different variety of separation lines, missing entries, etc. As such, the correct identification of the table-structure from an image is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present a new table-structure identification model. The latter improves the latest end-to-end deep learning model (i.e. encoder-dual-decoder from PubTabNet) in two significant ways. First, we introduce a new object detection decoder for table-cells. In this way, we can obtain the content of the table-cells from programmatic PDF's directly from the PDF source and avoid the training of the custom OCR decoders. This architectural change leads to more accurate table-content extraction and allows us to tackle non-english tables. Second, we replace the LSTM decoders with transformer based decoders. This upgrade improves significantly the previous state-of-the-art tree-editing-distance-score (TEDS) from 91% to 98.5% on simple tables and from 88.7% to 95% on complex tables.

To migrate the remarkable successes of Large Language Models (LLMs), the community has made numerous efforts to generalize them to the table reasoning tasks for the widely deployed tabular data. Despite that, in this work, by showing a probing experiment on our proposed StructQA benchmark, we postulate that even the most advanced LLMs (such as GPTs) may still fall short of coping with tabular data. More specifically, the current scheme often simply relies on serializing the tabular data, together with the meta information, then inputting them through the LLMs. We argue that the loss of structural information is the root of this shortcoming. In this work, we further propose TAMO, which bears an ideology to treat the tables as an independent modality integrated with the text tokens. The resulting model in TAMO is a multimodal framework consisting of a hypergraph neural network as the global table encoder seamlessly integrated with the mainstream LLM. Empirical results on various benchmarking datasets, including HiTab, WikiTQ, WikiSQL, FeTaQA, and StructQA, have demonstrated significant improvements on generalization with an average relative gain of 42.65%.

Tables are widely used in several types of documents since they can bring important information in a structured way. In scientific papers, tables can sum up novel discoveries and summarize experimental results, making the research comparable and easily understandable by scholars. Several methods perform table analysis working on document images, losing useful information during the conversion from the PDF files since OCR tools can be prone to recognition errors, in particular for text inside tables. The main contribution of this work is to tackle the problem of table extraction, exploiting Graph Neural Networks. Node features are enriched with suitably designed representation embeddings. These representations help to better distinguish not only tables from the other parts of the paper, but also table cells from table headers. We experimentally evaluated the proposed approach on a new dataset obtained by merging the information provided in the PubLayNet and PubTables-1M datasets.

For supervised learning with tabular data, decision tree ensembles produced via boosting techniques generally dominate real-world applications involving iid training/test sets. However for graph data where the iid assumption is violated due to structured relations between samples, it remains unclear how to best incorporate this structure within existing boosting pipelines. To this end, we propose a generalized framework for iterating boosting with graph propagation steps that share node/sample information across edges connecting related samples. Unlike previous efforts to integrate graph-based models with boosting, our approach is anchored in a principled meta loss function such that provable convergence can be guaranteed under relatively mild assumptions. Across a variety of non-iid graph datasets with tabular node features, our method achieves comparable or superior performance than both tabular and graph neural network models, as well as existing hybrid strategies that combine the two. Beyond producing better predictive performance than recently proposed graph models, our proposed techniques are easy to implement, computationally more efficient, and enjoy stronger theoretical guarantees (which make our results more reproducible).

We propose a generalization of transformer neural network architecture for arbitrary graphs. The original transformer was designed for Natural Language Processing (NLP), which operates on fully connected graphs representing all connections between the words in a sequence. Such architecture does not leverage the graph connectivity inductive bias, and can perform poorly when the graph topology is important and has not been encoded into the node features. We introduce a graph transformer with four new properties compared to the standard model. First, the attention mechanism is a function of the neighborhood connectivity for each node in the graph. Second, the positional encoding is represented by the Laplacian eigenvectors, which naturally generalize the sinusoidal positional encodings often used in NLP. Third, the layer normalization is replaced by a batch normalization layer, which provides faster training and better generalization performance. Finally, the architecture is extended to edge feature representation, which can be critical to tasks s.a. chemistry (bond type) or link prediction (entity relationship in knowledge graphs). Numerical experiments on a graph benchmark demonstrate the performance of the proposed graph transformer architecture. This work closes the gap between the original transformer, which was designed for the limited case of line graphs, and graph neural networks, that can work with arbitrary graphs. As our architecture is simple and generic, we believe it can be used as a black box for future applications that wish to consider transformer and graphs.

Recently, Transformer-like deep architectures have shown strong performance on tabular data problems. Unlike traditional models, e.g., MLP, these architectures map scalar values of numerical features to high-dimensional embeddings before mixing them in the main backbone. In this work, we argue that embeddings for numerical features are an underexplored degree of freedom in tabular DL, which allows constructing more powerful DL models and competing with GBDT on some traditionally GBDT-friendly benchmarks. We start by describing two conceptually different approaches to building embedding modules: the first one is based on a piecewise linear encoding of scalar values, and the second one utilizes periodic activations. Then, we empirically demonstrate that these two approaches can lead to significant performance boosts compared to the embeddings based on conventional blocks such as linear layers and ReLU activations. Importantly, we also show that embedding numerical features is beneficial for many backbones, not only for Transformers. Specifically, after proper embeddings, simple MLP-like models can perform on par with the attention-based architectures. Overall, we highlight embeddings for numerical features as an important design aspect with good potential for further improvements in tabular DL.

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.

Pretrained deep-learning models are the go-to solution for images or text. However, for tabular data the standard is still to train tree-based models. Pre-training or transfer is a huge challenge as in general tables have columns about different quantities and naming conventions that vary vastly across sources. Data integration tackles correspondences across multiple sources: schema matching for columns, and entity matching for entries. We propose a neural architecture that does not need such matches. As a result, we can pretrain it on background data that has not been matched. The architecture - CARTE for Context Aware Representation of Table Entries - uses a graph representation of tabular (or relational) data to process tables with different columns, string embeddings of entries and columns names to model an open vocabulary, and a graph-attentional network to contextualize entries with column names and neighboring entries. An extensive benchmark shows that CARTE facilitates learning, outperforming a solid set of baselines including the best tree-based models. CARTE also enables joint learning across tables with unmatched columns, enhancing a small table with bigger ones. CARTE opens the door to large pretrained models embarking information for tabular data.

Detecting empathy from video interactions is an emerging area of research. Video datasets, however, are often released as extracted features (i.e., tabular data) rather than raw footage due to privacy and ethical concerns. Prior research on such tabular datasets established tree-based classical machine learning approaches as the best-performing models. Motivated by the recent success of textual foundation models (i.e., large language models), we explore the use of tabular foundation models in empathy detection from tabular visual features. We experiment with two recent tabular foundation models - TabPFN v2 and TabICL - through in-context learning and fine-tuning setups. Our experiments on a public human-robot interaction benchmark demonstrate a significant boost in cross-subject empathy detection accuracy over several strong baselines (accuracy: 0.590 rightarrow 0.730; AUC: 0.564 rightarrow 0.669). In addition to performance improvement, we contribute novel insights and an evaluation setup to ensure generalisation on unseen subjects in this public benchmark. As the practice of releasing video features as tabular datasets is likely to persist due to privacy constraints, our findings will be widely applicable to future empathy detection video datasets as well.

Evaluating tabular generators remains a challenging problem, as the unique causal structural prior of heterogeneous tabular data does not lend itself to intuitive human inspection. Recent work has introduced structural fidelity as a tabular-specific evaluation dimension to assess whether synthetic data complies with the causal structures of real data. However, existing benchmarks often neglect the interplay between structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions, thus failing to provide a holistic understanding of model performance. Moreover, they are typically limited to toy datasets, as quantifying existing structural fidelity metrics requires access to ground-truth causal structures, which are rarely available for real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that jointly considers structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions. We introduce a new evaluation metric, global utility, which enables the assessment of structural fidelity even in the absence of ground-truth causal structures. In addition, we present TabStruct, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark offering large-scale quantitative analysis on 13 tabular generators from nine distinct categories, across 29 datasets. Our results demonstrate that global utility provides a task-independent, domain-agnostic lens for tabular generator performance. We release the TabStruct benchmark suite, including all datasets, evaluation pipelines, and raw results. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

Tabular data is among the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of data. However, the generation of synthetic samples with the original data's characteristics remains a significant challenge for tabular data. While many generative models from the computer vision domain, such as variational autoencoders or generative adversarial networks, have been adapted for tabular data generation, less research has been directed towards recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs), which are also generative in nature. To this end, we propose GReaT (Generation of Realistic Tabular data), which exploits an auto-regressive generative LLM to sample synthetic and yet highly realistic tabular data. Furthermore, GReaT can model tabular data distributions by conditioning on any subset of features; the remaining features are sampled without additional overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a series of experiments that quantify the validity and quality of the produced data samples from multiple angles. We find that GReaT maintains state-of-the-art performance across numerous real-world and synthetic data sets with heterogeneous feature types coming in various sizes.

Deep learning (DL) models for tabular data problems are receiving increasingly more attention, while the algorithms based on gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) remain a strong go-to solution. Following the recent trends in other domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision, several retrieval-augmented tabular DL models have been recently proposed. For a given target object, a retrieval-based model retrieves other relevant objects, such as the nearest neighbors, from the available (training) data and uses their features or even labels to make a better prediction. However, we show that the existing retrieval-based tabular DL solutions provide only minor, if any, benefits over the properly tuned simple retrieval-free baselines. Thus, it remains unclear whether the retrieval-based approach is a worthy direction for tabular DL. In this work, we give a strong positive answer to this question. We start by incrementally augmenting a simple feed-forward architecture with an attention-like retrieval component similar to those of many (tabular) retrieval-based models. Then, we highlight several details of the attention mechanism that turn out to have a massive impact on the performance on tabular data problems, but that were not explored in prior work. As a result, we design TabR -- a simple retrieval-based tabular DL model which, on a set of public benchmarks, demonstrates the best average performance among tabular DL models, becomes the new state-of-the-art on several datasets, and even outperforms GBDT models on the recently proposed ``GBDT-friendly'' benchmark (see the first figure).

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.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chart understanding tasks. However, interpreting charts with textual descriptions often leads to information loss, as it fails to fully capture the dense information embedded in charts. In contrast, parsing charts into code provides lossless representations that can effectively contain all critical details. Although existing open-source MLLMs have achieved success in chart understanding tasks, they still face two major challenges when applied to chart-to-code tasks.: (1) Low executability and poor restoration of chart details in the generated code and (2) Lack of large-scale and diverse training data. To address these challenges, we propose ChartCoder, the first dedicated chart-to-code MLLM, which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code. Furthermore, we introduce Chart2Code-160k, the first large-scale and diverse dataset for chart-to-code generation, and propose the Snippet-of-Thought (SoT) method, which transforms direct chart-to-code generation data into step-by-step generation. Experiments demonstrate that ChartCoder, with only 7B parameters, surpasses existing open-source MLLMs on chart-to-code benchmarks, achieving superior chart restoration and code excitability. Our code will be available at https://github.com/thunlp/ChartCoder.

The existing literature on deep learning for tabular data proposes a wide range of novel architectures and reports competitive results on various datasets. However, the proposed models are usually not properly compared to each other and existing works often use different benchmarks and experiment protocols. As a result, it is unclear for both researchers and practitioners what models perform best. Additionally, the field still lacks effective baselines, that is, the easy-to-use models that provide competitive performance across different problems. In this work, we perform an overview of the main families of DL architectures for tabular data and raise the bar of baselines in tabular DL by identifying two simple and powerful deep architectures. The first one is a ResNet-like architecture which turns out to be a strong baseline that is often missing in prior works. The second model is our simple adaptation of the Transformer architecture for tabular data, which outperforms other solutions on most tasks. Both models are compared to many existing architectures on a diverse set of tasks under the same training and tuning protocols. We also compare the best DL models with Gradient Boosted Decision Trees and conclude that there is still no universally superior solution.

Tabular data -- structured, heterogeneous, spreadsheet-style data with rows and columns -- is widely used in practice across many domains. However, while recent foundation models have reduced the need for developing task-specific datasets and predictors in domains such as language modeling and computer vision, this transfer learning paradigm has not had similar impact in the tabular domain. In this work, we seek to narrow this gap and present TabuLa-8B, a language model for tabular prediction. We define a process for extracting a large, high-quality training dataset from the TabLib corpus, proposing methods for tabular data filtering and quality control. Using the resulting dataset, which comprises over 1.6B rows from 3.1M unique tables, we fine-tune a Llama 3-8B large language model (LLM) for tabular data prediction (classification and binned regression) using a novel packing and attention scheme for tabular prediction. Through evaluation across a test suite of 329 datasets, we find that TabuLa-8B has zero-shot accuracy on unseen tables that is over 15 percentage points (pp) higher than random guessing, a feat that is not possible with existing state-of-the-art tabular prediction models (e.g. XGBoost, TabPFN). In the few-shot setting (1-32 shots), without any fine-tuning on the target datasets, TabuLa-8B is 5-15 pp more accurate than XGBoost and TabPFN models that are explicitly trained on equal, or even up to 16x more data. We release our model, code, and data along with the publication of this paper.

Graph pre-training has achieved remarkable success in recent years, delivering transferable representations for downstream adaptation. However, most existing methods are designed for either homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs, thereby hindering unified graph modeling across diverse graph types. This separation contradicts real-world applications, where mixed homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs are ubiquitous, and distribution shifts between upstream pre-training and downstream deployment are common. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that a balanced mixture of homogeneous and heterogeneous graph pre-training benefits downstream tasks and propose a unified multi-domain Graph Pre-training method across Homogeneous and Heterogeneous graphs (GPH^{2}). To address the lack of a unified encoder for homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs, we propose a Unified Multi-View Graph Construction that simultaneously encodes both without explicit graph-type-specific designs. To cope with the increased cross-domain distribution discrepancies arising from mixed graphs, we introduce domain-specific expert encoding. Each expert is independently pre-trained on a single graph to capture domain-specific knowledge, thereby shielding the pre-training encoder from the adverse effects of cross-domain discrepancies. For downstream tasks, we further design a Task-oriented Expert Fusion Strategy that adaptively integrates multiple experts based on their discriminative strengths. Extensive experiments on mixed graphs demonstrate that GPH^{2} enables stable transfer across graph types and domains, significantly outperforming existing graph pre-training methods.

Research on parsing language to SQL has largely ignored the structure of the database (DB) schema, either because the DB was very simple, or because it was observed at both training and test time. In Spider, a recently-released text-to-SQL dataset, new and complex DBs are given at test time, and so the structure of the DB schema can inform the predicted SQL query. In this paper, we present an encoder-decoder semantic parser, where the structure of the DB schema is encoded with a graph neural network, and this representation is later used at both encoding and decoding time. Evaluation shows that encoding the schema structure improves our parser accuracy from 33.8% to 39.4%, dramatically above the current state of the art, which is at 19.7%.

This paper integrates graph-to-sequence into an end-to-end text-to-speech framework for syntax-aware modelling with syntactic information of input text. Specifically, the input text is parsed by a dependency parsing module to form a syntactic graph. The syntactic graph is then encoded by a graph encoder to extract the syntactic hidden information, which is concatenated with phoneme embedding and input to the alignment and flow-based decoding modules to generate the raw audio waveform. The model is experimented on two languages, English and Mandarin, using single-speaker, few samples of target speakers, and multi-speaker datasets, respectively. Experimental results show better prosodic consistency performance between input text and generated audio, and also get higher scores in the subjective prosodic evaluation, and show the ability of voice conversion. Besides, the efficiency of the model is largely boosted through the design of the AI chip operator with 5x acceleration.

Images and structured tables are essential parts of real-world databases. Though tabular-image representation learning is promising to create new insights, it remains a challenging task, as tabular data is typically heterogeneous and incomplete, presenting significant modality disparities with images. Earlier works have mainly focused on simple modality fusion strategies in complete data scenarios, without considering the missing data issue, and thus are limited in practice. In this paper, we propose TIP, a novel tabular-image pre-training framework for learning multimodal representations robust to incomplete tabular data. Specifically, TIP investigates a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy, including a masked tabular reconstruction task for tackling data missingness, and image-tabular matching and contrastive learning objectives to capture multimodal information. Moreover, TIP proposes a versatile tabular encoder tailored for incomplete, heterogeneous tabular data and a multimodal interaction module for inter-modality representation learning. Experiments are performed on downstream multimodal classification tasks using both natural and medical image datasets. The results show that TIP outperforms state-of-the-art supervised/SSL image/multimodal algorithms in both complete and incomplete data scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/siyi-wind/TIP.

Tabular data is one of the most common data sources in machine learning. Although a wide range of classical methods demonstrate practical utilities in this field, deep learning methods on tabular data are becoming promising alternatives due to their flexibility and ability to capture complex interactions within the data. Considering that deep tabular methods have diverse design philosophies, including the ways they handle features, design learning objectives, and construct model architectures, we introduce a versatile deep-learning toolbox called TALENT (Tabular Analytics and LEarNing Toolbox) to utilize, analyze, and compare tabular methods. TALENT encompasses an extensive collection of more than 20 deep tabular prediction methods, associated with various encoding and normalization modules, and provides a unified interface that is easily integrable with new methods as they emerge. In this paper, we present the design and functionality of the toolbox, illustrate its practical application through several case studies, and investigate the performance of various methods fairly based on our toolbox. Code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.

Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in graph representation learning, with the continuous embedding approach emerging as the dominant paradigm. However, such methods encounter issues regarding parameter efficiency, interpretability, and robustness. Thus, Quantized Graph Representation (QGR) learning has recently gained increasing interest, which represents the graph structure with discrete codes instead of conventional continuous embeddings. Given its analogous representation form to natural language, QGR also possesses the capability to seamlessly integrate graph structures with large language models (LLMs). As this emerging paradigm is still in its infancy yet holds significant promise, we undertake this thorough survey to promote its rapid future prosperity. We first present the background of the general quantization methods and their merits. Moreover, we provide an in-depth demonstration of current QGR studies from the perspectives of quantized strategies, training objectives, distinctive designs, knowledge graph quantization, and applications. We further explore the strategies for code dependence learning and integration with LLMs. At last, we give discussions and conclude future directions, aiming to provide a comprehensive picture of QGR and inspire future research.

Data organized in tabular format is ubiquitous in real-world applications, and users often craft tables with biased feature definitions and flexibly set prediction targets of their interests. Thus, a rapid development of a robust, effective, dataset-versatile, user-friendly tabular prediction approach is highly desired. While Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively utilized by professional users, they present several challenges for casual users, particularly: (i) the dilemma of model selection due to their different dataset preferences, and (ii) the need for heavy hyperparameter searching, failing which their performances are deemed inadequate. In this paper, we delve into this question: Can we develop a deep learning model that serves as a "sure bet" solution for a wide range of tabular prediction tasks, while also being user-friendly for casual users? We delve into three key drawbacks of deep tabular models, encompassing: (P1) lack of rotational variance property, (P2) large data demand, and (P3) over-smooth solution. We propose ExcelFormer, addressing these challenges through a semi-permeable attention module that effectively constrains the influence of less informative features to break the DNNs' rotational invariance property (for P1), data augmentation approaches tailored for tabular data (for P2), and attentive feedforward network to boost the model fitting capability (for P3). These designs collectively make ExcelFormer a "sure bet" solution for diverse tabular datasets. Extensive and stratified experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous approaches across diverse tabular data prediction tasks, and this framework can be friendly to casual users, offering ease of use without the heavy hyperparameter tuning.

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 .

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.

Tabular data is a crucial form of information expression, which can organize data in a standard structure for easy information retrieval and comparison. However, in financial industry and many other fields tables are often disclosed in unstructured digital files, e.g. Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, which are difficult to be extracted directly. In this paper, to facilitate deep learning based table extraction from unstructured digital files, we publish a standard Chinese dataset named FinTab, which contains more than 1,600 financial tables of diverse kinds and their corresponding structure representation in JSON. In addition, we propose a novel graph-based convolutional neural network model named GFTE as a baseline for future comparison. GFTE integrates image feature, position feature and textual feature together for precise edge prediction and reaches overall good results.

Self-supervised representation learning methods have achieved significant success in computer vision and natural language processing, where data samples exhibit explicit spatial or semantic dependencies. However, applying these methods to tabular data is challenging due to the less pronounced dependencies among data samples. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SwitchTab, a novel self-supervised method specifically designed to capture latent dependencies in tabular data. SwitchTab leverages an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework to decouple mutual and salient features among data pairs, resulting in more representative embeddings. These embeddings, in turn, contribute to better decision boundaries and lead to improved results in downstream tasks. To validate the effectiveness of SwitchTab, we conduct extensive experiments across various domains involving tabular data. The results showcase superior performance in end-to-end prediction tasks with fine-tuning. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained salient embeddings can be utilized as plug-and-play features to enhance the performance of various traditional classification methods (e.g., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, etc.). Lastly, we highlight the capability of SwitchTab to create explainable representations through visualization of decoupled mutual and salient features in the latent space.

Synthetic data generation has become essential for securely sharing and analyzing sensitive data sets. Traditional anonymization techniques, however, often fail to adequately preserve privacy. We introduce the Tabular Auto-Regressive Generative Network (TabularARGN), a neural network architecture specifically designed for generating high-quality synthetic tabular data. Using a discretization-based auto-regressive approach, TabularARGN achieves high data fidelity while remaining computationally efficient. We evaluate TabularARGN against existing synthetic data generation methods, showing competitive results in statistical similarity, machine learning utility, and detection robustness. We further perform an in-depth privacy evaluation using systematic membership-inference attacks, highlighting the robustness and effective privacy-utility balance of our approach.

In this paper, we propose a new class of metric for table structure recognition (TSR) evaluation, called grid table similarity (GriTS). Unlike prior metrics, GriTS evaluates the correctness of a predicted table directly in its natural form as a matrix. To create a similarity measure between matrices, we generalize the two-dimensional largest common substructure (2D-LCS) problem, which is NP-hard, to the 2D most similar substructures (2D-MSS) problem and propose a polynomial-time heuristic for solving it. This algorithm produces both an upper and a lower bound on the true similarity between matrices. We show using evaluation on a large real-world dataset that in practice there is almost no difference between these bounds. We compare GriTS to other metrics and empirically validate that matrix similarity exhibits more desirable behavior than alternatives for TSR performance evaluation. Finally, GriTS unifies all three subtasks of cell topology recognition, cell location recognition, and cell content recognition within the same framework, which simplifies the evaluation and enables more meaningful comparisons across different types of TSR approaches. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

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.

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.

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.

Generating synthetic tabular data is critical in machine learning, especially when real data is limited or sensitive. Traditional generative models often face challenges due to the unique characteristics of tabular data, such as mixed data types and varied distributions, and require complex preprocessing or large pretrained models. In this paper, we introduce a novel, lossless binary transformation method that converts any tabular data into fixed-size binary representations, and a corresponding new generative model called Binary Diffusion, specifically designed for binary data. Binary Diffusion leverages the simplicity of XOR operations for noise addition and removal and employs binary cross-entropy loss for training. Our approach eliminates the need for extensive preprocessing, complex noise parameter tuning, and pretraining on large datasets. We evaluate our model on several popular tabular benchmark datasets, demonstrating that Binary Diffusion outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on Travel, Adult Income, and Diabetes datasets while being significantly smaller in size.

Transformers have demonstrated success in graph learning, particularly for node-level tasks. However, existing methods encounter an information bottleneck when generating graph-level representations. The prevalent single token paradigm fails to fully leverage the inherent strength of self-attention in encoding token sequences, and degenerates into a weighted sum of node signals. To address this issue, we design a novel serialized token paradigm to encapsulate global signals more effectively. Specifically, a graph serialization method is proposed to aggregate node signals into serialized graph tokens, with positional encoding being automatically involved. Then, stacked self-attention layers are applied to encode this token sequence and capture its internal dependencies. Our method can yield more expressive graph representations by modeling complex interactions among multiple graph tokens. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on several graph-level benchmarks. Ablation studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

Evaluating the quality of tables generated by large language models (LLMs) remains an open challenge: existing metrics either flatten tables into text, ignoring structure, or rely on fixed references that limit generalization. We present TabReX, a reference-less, property-driven framework for evaluating tabular generation via graph-based reasoning. TabReX converts both source text and generated tables into canonical knowledge graphs, aligns them through an LLM-guided matching process, and computes interpretable, rubric-aware scores that quantify structural and factual fidelity. The resulting metric provides controllable trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity, yielding human-aligned judgments and cell-level error traces. To systematically asses metric robustness, we introduce TabReX-Bench, a large-scale benchmark spanning six domains and twelve planner-driven perturbation types across three difficulty tiers. Empirical results show that TabReX achieves the highest correlation with expert rankings, remains stable under harder perturbations, and enables fine-grained model-vs-prompt analysis establishing a new paradigm for trustworthy, explainable evaluation of structured generation systems.

Tabular data analysis presents unique challenges that arise from heterogeneous feature types, missing values, and complex feature interactions. While traditional machine learning methods like gradient boosting often outperform deep learning, recent advancements in neural architectures offer promising alternatives. In this study, we introduce TabKAN, a novel framework for tabular data modeling based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Unlike conventional deep learning models, KANs use learnable activation functions on edges, which improves both interpretability and training efficiency. TabKAN incorporates modular KAN-based architectures designed for tabular analysis and proposes a transfer learning framework for knowledge transfer across domains. Furthermore, we develop a model-specific interpretability approach that reduces reliance on post hoc explanations. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that TabKAN achieves superior performance in supervised learning and significantly outperforms classical and Transformer-based models in binary and multi-class classification. The results demonstrate the potential of KAN-based architectures to bridge the gap between traditional machine learning and deep learning for structured data.

Graph learning has become indispensable for interpreting and harnessing relational data in diverse fields, ranging from recommendation systems to social network analysis. In this context, a variety of GNNs have emerged as promising methodologies for encoding the structural information of graphs. By effectively capturing the graph's underlying structure, these GNNs have shown great potential in enhancing performance in graph learning tasks, such as link prediction and node classification. However, despite their successes, a significant challenge persists: these advanced methods often face difficulties in generalizing to unseen graph data that significantly differs from the training instances. In this work, our aim is to advance the graph learning paradigm by developing a general graph foundation model. This model is designed to understand the complex topological patterns present in diverse graph data, enabling it to excel in zero-shot graph learning tasks across different downstream datasets. To achieve this goal, we address several key technical challenges in our OpenGraph model. Firstly, we propose a unified graph tokenizer to adapt our graph model to generalize well on unseen graph data, even when the underlying graph properties differ significantly from those encountered during training. Secondly, we develop a scalable graph transformer as the foundational encoder, which effectively captures node-wise dependencies within the global topological context. Thirdly, we introduce a data augmentation mechanism enhanced by a LLM to alleviate the limitations of data scarcity in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework. By adapting our OpenGraph to new graph characteristics and comprehending the nuances of diverse graphs, our approach achieves remarkable zero-shot graph learning performance across various settings and domains.

Recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs) have been driven by innovations in architectures and Positional Encodings (PEs), which are critical for augmenting node features and capturing graph topology. PEs are essential for GTs, where topological information would otherwise be lost without message-passing. However, PEs are often tested alongside novel architectures, making it difficult to isolate their effect on established models. To address this, we present a comprehensive benchmark of PEs in a unified framework that includes both message-passing GNNs and GTs. We also establish theoretical connections between MPNNs and GTs and introduce a sparsified GRIT attention mechanism to examine the influence of global connectivity. Our findings demonstrate that previously untested combinations of GNN architectures and PEs can outperform existing methods and offer a more comprehensive picture of the state-of-the-art. To support future research and experimentation in our framework, we make the code publicly available.

Graphs are a fundamental data structure for representing relationships in real-world scenarios. With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, there has been growing interest in integrating LLMs for graph learning. However, applying LLMs to graph-related tasks poses significant challenges, as these models are not inherently designed to capture the complex structural information present in graphs. Existing approaches address this challenge through two strategies: the chain of tasks approach, which uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to encode the graph structure so that LLMs are relieved from understanding spatial positions; and Graph-to-Text Conversion, which translates graph structures into semantic text representations that LLMs can process. Despite their progress, these methods often struggle to fully preserve the topological information of graphs or require extensive computational resources, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we introduce Node Tokenizer for Large Language Models (NT-LLM), a novel framework that efficiently encodes graph structures by selecting key nodes as anchors and representing each node based on its relative distance to these anchors. This position-anchored encoding effectively captures the graph topology, enabling enhanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs over graph data. Additionally, we implement a task-specific tuning procedure to further improve structural understanding within LLMs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, NT-LLM demonstrates significant performance improvements across a variety of graph-related tasks.

We present ReMasker, a new method of imputing missing values in tabular data by extending the masked autoencoding framework. Compared with prior work, ReMasker is both simple -- besides the missing values (i.e., naturally masked), we randomly ``re-mask'' another set of values, optimize the autoencoder by reconstructing this re-masked set, and apply the trained model to predict the missing values; and effective -- with extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets, we show that ReMasker performs on par with or outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both imputation fidelity and utility under various missingness settings, while its performance advantage often increases with the ratio of missing data. We further explore theoretical justification for its effectiveness, showing that ReMasker tends to learn missingness-invariant representations of tabular data. Our findings indicate that masked modeling represents a promising direction for further research on tabular data imputation. The code is publicly available.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising potential in graph representation learning. The majority of GNNs define a local message-passing mechanism, propagating information over the graph by stacking multiple layers. These methods, however, are known to suffer from two major limitations: over-squashing and poor capturing of long-range dependencies. Recently, Graph Transformers (GTs) emerged as a powerful alternative to Message-Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). GTs, however, have quadratic computational cost, lack inductive biases on graph structures, and rely on complex Positional/Structural Encodings (SE/PE). In this paper, we show that while Transformers, complex message-passing, and SE/PE are sufficient for good performance in practice, neither is necessary. Motivated by the recent success of State Space Models (SSMs), such as Mamba, we present Graph Mamba Networks (GMNs), a general framework for a new class of GNNs based on selective SSMs. We discuss and categorize the new challenges when adopting SSMs to graph-structured data, and present four required and one optional steps to design GMNs, where we choose (1) Neighborhood Tokenization, (2) Token Ordering, (3) Architecture of Bidirectional Selective SSM Encoder, (4) Local Encoding, and dispensable (5) PE and SE. We further provide theoretical justification for the power of GMNs. Experiments demonstrate that despite much less computational cost, GMNs attain an outstanding performance in long-range, small-scale, large-scale, and heterophilic benchmark datasets.

Tabular data underpins decisions across science, industry, and public services. Despite rapid progress, advances in deep learning have not fully carried over to the tabular domain, where gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) remain a default choice in practice. We present iLTM, an integrated Large Tabular Model that unifies tree-derived embeddings, dimensionality-agnostic representations, a meta-trained hypernetwork, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), and retrieval within a single architecture. Pretrained on more than 1,800 heterogeneous classification datasets, iLTM achieves consistently superior performance across tabular classification and regression tasks, from small datasets to large and high-dimensional tasks. After light fine-tuning, the meta-trained hypernetwork transfers to regression targets, matching or surpassing strong baselines. Extensive experiments show that iLTM outperforms well-tuned GBDTs and leading deep tabular models while requiring less task-specific tuning. By bridging the gap between tree-based and neural methods, iLTM offers a new framework for tabular foundation models for robust, adaptable, and scalable tabular learning.

In this paper, we approach an overlooked yet critical task Graph2Image: generating images from multimodal attributed graphs (MMAGs). This task poses significant challenges due to the explosion in graph size, dependencies among graph entities, and the need for controllability in graph conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a graph context-conditioned diffusion model called InstructG2I. InstructG2I first exploits the graph structure and multimodal information to conduct informative neighbor sampling by combining personalized page rank and re-ranking based on vision-language features. Then, a Graph-QFormer encoder adaptively encodes the graph nodes into an auxiliary set of graph prompts to guide the denoising process of diffusion. Finally, we propose graph classifier-free guidance, enabling controllable generation by varying the strength of graph guidance and multiple connected edges to a node. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/InstructG2I.

Tabular Foundation Models have recently established the state of the art in supervised tabular learning, by leveraging pretraining to learn generalizable representations of numerical and categorical structured data. However, they lack native support for unstructured modalities such as text and image, and rely on frozen, pretrained embeddings to process them. On established Multimodal Tabular Learning benchmarks, we show that tuning the embeddings to the task improves performance. Existing benchmarks, however, often focus on the mere co-occurrence of modalities; this leads to high variance across datasets and masks the benefits of task-specific tuning. To address this gap, we introduce MulTaBench, a benchmark of 40 datasets, split equally between image-tabular and text-tabular tasks. We focus on predictive tasks where the modalities provide complementary predictive signal, and where generic embeddings lose critical information, necessitating Target-Aware Representations that are aligned with the task. Our experimental results demonstrate that the gains from target-aware representation tuning generalize across both text and image modalities, several tabular learners, encoder scales, and embedding dimensions. MulTaBench constitutes the largest image-tabular benchmarking effort to date, spanning high-impact domains such as healthcare and e-commerce. It is designed to enable the research of novel architectures which incorporate joint modeling and target-aware representations, paving the way for the development of novel Multimodal Tabular Foundation Models.

Tabular data underpins numerous high-impact applications of machine learning from fraud detection to genomics and healthcare. Classical approaches to solving tabular problems, such as gradient boosting and random forests, are widely used by practitioners. However, recent deep learning methods have achieved a degree of performance competitive with popular techniques. We devise a hybrid deep learning approach to solving tabular data problems. Our method, SAINT, performs attention over both rows and columns, and it includes an enhanced embedding method. We also study a new contrastive self-supervised pre-training method for use when labels are scarce. SAINT consistently improves performance over previous deep learning methods, and it even outperforms gradient boosting methods, including XGBoost, CatBoost, and LightGBM, on average over a variety of benchmark tasks.

We present PyTorch Frame, a PyTorch-based framework for deep learning over multi-modal tabular data. PyTorch Frame makes tabular deep learning easy by providing a PyTorch-based data structure to handle complex tabular data, introducing a model abstraction to enable modular implementation of tabular models, and allowing external foundation models to be incorporated to handle complex columns (e.g., LLMs for text columns). We demonstrate the usefulness of PyTorch Frame by implementing diverse tabular models in a modular way, successfully applying these models to complex multi-modal tabular data, and integrating our framework with PyTorch Geometric, a PyTorch library for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to perform end-to-end learning over relational databases.

Given a graph G and the desired size k in bits, how can we summarize G within k bits, while minimizing the information loss? Large-scale graphs have become omnipresent, posing considerable computational challenges. Analyzing such large graphs can be fast and easy if they are compressed sufficiently to fit in main memory or even cache. Graph summarization, which yields a coarse-grained summary graph with merged nodes, stands out with several advantages among graph compression techniques. Thus, a number of algorithms have been developed for obtaining a concise summary graph with little information loss or equivalently small reconstruction error. However, the existing methods focus solely on reducing the number of nodes, and they often yield dense summary graphs, failing to achieve better compression rates. Moreover, due to their limited scalability, they can be applied only to moderate-size graphs. In this work, we propose SSumM, a scalable and effective graph-summarization algorithm that yields a sparse summary graph. SSumM not only merges nodes together but also sparsifies the summary graph, and the two strategies are carefully balanced based on the minimum description length principle. Compared with state-of-the-art competitors, SSumM is (a) Concise: yields up to 11.2X smaller summary graphs with similar reconstruction error, (b) Accurate: achieves up to 4.2X smaller reconstruction error with similarly concise outputs, and (c) Scalable: summarizes 26X larger graphs while exhibiting linear scalability. We validate these advantages through extensive experiments on 10 real-world graphs.

Advances in generative modeling have recently been adapted to tabular data containing discrete and continuous features. However, generating mixed-type features that combine discrete states with an otherwise continuous distribution in a single feature remains challenging. We advance the state-of-the-art in diffusion models for tabular data with a cascaded approach. We first generate a low-resolution version of a tabular data row, that is, the collection of the purely categorical features and a coarse categorical representation of numerical features. Next, this information is leveraged in the high-resolution flow matching model via a novel guided conditional probability path and data-dependent coupling. The low-resolution representation of numerical features explicitly accounts for discrete outcomes, such as missing or inflated values, and therewith enables a more faithful generation of mixed-type features. We formally prove that this cascade tightens the transport cost bound. The results indicate that our model generates significantly more realistic samples and captures distributional details more accurately, for example, the detection score increases by 40%.

The success of self-supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing has motivated pretraining methods on tabular data. However, most existing tabular self-supervised learning models fail to leverage information across multiple data tables and cannot generalize to new tables. In this work, we introduce XTab, a framework for cross-table pretraining of tabular transformers on datasets from various domains. We address the challenge of inconsistent column types and quantities among tables by utilizing independent featurizers and using federated learning to pretrain the shared component. Tested on 84 tabular prediction tasks from the OpenML-AutoML Benchmark (AMLB), we show that (1) XTab consistently boosts the generalizability, learning speed, and performance of multiple tabular transformers, (2) by pretraining FT-Transformer via XTab, we achieve superior performance than other state-of-the-art tabular deep learning models on various tasks such as regression, binary, and multiclass classification.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across modalities such as images and text. However, tabular data, despite being a critical real-world modality, remains relatively underexplored in multimodal learning. In this paper, we focus on the task of Tabular-Vision Multi-Modal Understanding (TVMU) and identify three core challenges: (1) high structural variability and data incompleteness in tables, (2) implicit and complex feature dependencies, and (3) significant heterogeneity in problem-solving pipelines across downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose Thinking with Tables (TWT). TWT employs a program-aided code-based neuro-symbolic reasoning mechanism that facilitates key operations, such as information extraction and element modeling, by interacting with external environments. We evaluate TWT on eight representative datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that TWT consistently outperforms existing baselines by an average of 10\% in accuracy, achieving performance comparable to, or even surpassing, proprietary commercial SOTA LLMs on TVMU tasks. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/kunyang-YU/Thinking-with-Tables

Neuronal morphology encodes critical information about circuit function, development, and disease, yet current methods analyze topology or graph structure in isolation. We introduce GraPHFormer, a multimodal architecture that unifies these complementary views through CLIP-style contrastive learning. Our vision branch processes a novel three-channel persistence image encoding unweighted, persistence-weighted, and radius-weighted topological densities via DINOv2-ViT-S. In parallel, a TreeLSTM encoder captures geometric and radial attributes from skeleton graphs. Both project to a shared embedding space trained with symmetric InfoNCE loss, augmented by persistence-space transformations that preserve topological semantics. Evaluated on six benchmarks (BIL-6, ACT-4, JML-4, N7, M1-Cell, M1-REG) spanning self-supervised and supervised settings, GraPHFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, significantly outperforming topology-only, graph-only, and morphometrics baselines. We demonstrate practical utility by discriminating glial morphologies across cortical regions and species, and detecting signatures of developmental and degenerative processes. Code: https://github.com/Uzshah/GraPHFormer

In the last few years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become the standard toolkit for analyzing and learning from data on graphs. This emerging field has witnessed an extensive growth of promising techniques that have been applied with success to computer science, mathematics, biology, physics and chemistry. But for any successful field to become mainstream and reliable, benchmarks must be developed to quantify progress. This led us in March 2020 to release a benchmark framework that i) comprises of a diverse collection of mathematical and real-world graphs, ii) enables fair model comparison with the same parameter budget to identify key architectures, iii) has an open-source, easy-to-use and reproducible code infrastructure, and iv) is flexible for researchers to experiment with new theoretical ideas. As of December 2022, the GitHub repository has reached 2,000 stars and 380 forks, which demonstrates the utility of the proposed open-source framework through the wide usage by the GNN community. In this paper, we present an updated version of our benchmark with a concise presentation of the aforementioned framework characteristics, an additional medium-sized molecular dataset AQSOL, similar to the popular ZINC, but with a real-world measured chemical target, and discuss how this framework can be leveraged to explore new GNN designs and insights. As a proof of value of our benchmark, we study the case of graph positional encoding (PE) in GNNs, which was introduced with this benchmark and has since spurred interest of exploring more powerful PE for Transformers and GNNs in a robust experimental setting.

We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data. We find that rotating tokens depending on the spectrum of the graph Laplacian efficiently injects structural information into the attention mechanism, boosting performance in synthetic and real-world graph learning tasks. This approach, coined _Wave-Induced Rotary Encodings_ (WIRE), enjoys intriguing theoretical properties: it recovers regular RoPE on grids, and depends asymptotically on the graph effective resistance. Unlike bias-based relative position encodings, WIRE is compatible with linear attention.

TabPFN v2 achieves better results than tree-based models on several tabular benchmarks, which is notable since tree-based models are usually the strongest choice for tabular data. However, it cannot handle more than 10K context tokens because transformers have quadratic computation and memory costs. Unlike existing approaches that rely on context compression, such as selecting representative samples via K-nearest neighbors (KNN), we introduce a tiled-block strategy to compute attention within the TabPFN framework. This design is compatible with standard GPU setups and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to enable TabPFN to process long contexts without any pre-processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the standard TabArena benchmark.

Research on adversarial robustness is primarily focused on image and text data. Yet, many scenarios in which lack of robustness can result in serious risks, such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, or recommender systems often do not rely on images or text but instead on tabular data. Adversarial robustness in tabular data poses two serious challenges. First, tabular datasets often contain categorical features, and therefore cannot be tackled directly with existing optimization procedures. Second, in the tabular domain, algorithms that are not based on deep networks are widely used and offer great performance, but algorithms to enhance robustness are tailored to neural networks (e.g. adversarial training). In this paper, we tackle both challenges. We present a method that allows us to train adversarially robust deep networks for tabular data and to transfer this robustness to other classifiers via universal robust embeddings tailored to categorical data. These embeddings, created using a bilevel alternating minimization framework, can be transferred to boosted trees or random forests making them robust without the need for adversarial training while preserving their high accuracy on tabular data. We show that our methods outperform existing techniques within a practical threat model suitable for tabular data.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently enabled coding agents capable of generating, executing, and revising visualization code. However, existing models often fail in practical workflows due to limited language coverage, unreliable execution, and lack of iterative correction mechanisms. Progress has been constrained by narrow datasets and benchmarks that emphasize single-round generation and single-language tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce three complementary resources for advancing visualization coding agents. VisCode-Multi-679K is a large-scale, supervised dataset containing 679K validated and executable visualization samples with multi-turn correction dialogues across 12 programming languages. VisPlotBench is a benchmark for systematic evaluation, featuring executable tasks, rendered outputs, and protocols for both initial generation and multi-round self-debug. Finally, we present VisCoder2, a family of multi-language visualization models trained on VisCode-Multi-679K. Experiments show that VisCoder2 significantly outperforms strong open-source baselines and approaches the performance of proprietary models like GPT-4.1, with further gains from iterative self-debug, reaching 82.4% overall execution pass rate at the 32B scale, particularly in symbolic or compiler-dependent languages.

We propose a novel high-performance and interpretable canonical deep tabular data learning architecture, TabNet. TabNet uses sequential attention to choose which features to reason from at each decision step, enabling interpretability and more efficient learning as the learning capacity is used for the most salient features. We demonstrate that TabNet outperforms other neural network and decision tree variants on a wide range of non-performance-saturated tabular datasets and yields interpretable feature attributions plus insights into the global model behavior. Finally, for the first time to our knowledge, we demonstrate self-supervised learning for tabular data, significantly improving performance with unsupervised representation learning when unlabeled data is abundant.

GNN-to-MLP distillation aims to utilize knowledge distillation (KD) to learn computationally-efficient multi-layer perceptron (student MLP) on graph data by mimicking the output representations of teacher GNN. Existing methods mainly make the MLP to mimic the GNN predictions over a few class labels. However, the class space may not be expressive enough for covering numerous diverse local graph structures, thus limiting the performance of knowledge transfer from GNN to MLP. To address this issue, we propose to learn a new powerful graph representation space by directly labeling nodes' diverse local structures for GNN-to-MLP distillation. Specifically, we propose a variant of VQ-VAE to learn a structure-aware tokenizer on graph data that can encode each node's local substructure as a discrete code. The discrete codes constitute a codebook as a new graph representation space that is able to identify different local graph structures of nodes with the corresponding code indices. Then, based on the learned codebook, we propose a new distillation target, namely soft code assignments, to directly transfer the structural knowledge of each node from GNN to MLP. The resulting framework VQGraph achieves new state-of-the-art performance on GNN-to-MLP distillation in both transductive and inductive settings across seven graph datasets. We show that VQGraph with better performance infers faster than GNNs by 828x, and also achieves accuracy improvement over GNNs and stand-alone MLPs by 3.90% and 28.05% on average, respectively. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/VQGraph.

Syntax-incorporated machine translation models have been proven successful in improving the model's reasoning and meaning preservation ability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective graph-structured encoder, the Recurrent Graph Syntax Encoder, dubbed RGSE, which enhances the ability to capture useful syntactic information. The RGSE is done over a standard encoder (recurrent or self-attention encoder), regarding recurrent network units as graph nodes and injects syntactic dependencies as edges, such that RGSE models syntactic dependencies and sequential information (i.e., word order) simultaneously. Our approach achieves considerable improvements over several syntax-aware NMT models in EnglishRightarrowGerman and EnglishRightarrowCzech translation tasks. And RGSE-equipped big model obtains competitive result compared with the state-of-the-art model in WMT14 En-De task. Extensive analysis further verifies that RGSE could benefit long sentence modeling, and produces better translations.

Graph foundation models represent a transformative paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains. Recent methods leverage large language models to unify graph and text modalities into a shared representation space using contrastive learning. However, systematic evaluations reveal significant performance degradation at structural boundaries where distinct topological patterns converge, with accuracy losses exceeding 20 percentage points. This issue arises from a key limitation: current methods assume all graph structures can be encoded within a single Euclidean space. In reality, tree structures require hyperbolic geometry to preserve hierarchical branching, while cyclic patterns depend on spherical geometry for closure properties. At structural boundaries, nodes experience conflicting geometric constraints that uniform encoding spaces cannot resolve. This raises a crucial challenge: Can alignment frameworks be designed to respect the intrinsic geometric diversity of graph structures? We introduce GraphShaper, a geometry-aware framework that enhances graph encoding through multi-geometric specialization. Our approach employs expert networks tailored to different geometric spaces, dynamically computing fusion weights to adaptively integrate geometric properties based on local structural characteristics. This adaptive fusion preserves structural integrity before alignment with text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphShaper achieves 9.47\% accuracy improvements on citation networks and 7.63\% on social networks in zero-shot settings.

The widespread enthusiasm for deep learning has recently expanded into the domain of tabular data. Recognizing that the advancement in deep tabular methods is often inspired by classical methods, e.g., integration of nearest neighbors into neural networks, we investigate whether these classical methods can be revitalized with modern techniques. We revisit a differentiable version of K-nearest neighbors (KNN) -- Neighbourhood Components Analysis (NCA) -- originally designed to learn a linear projection to capture semantic similarities between instances, and seek to gradually add modern deep learning techniques on top. Surprisingly, our implementation of NCA using SGD and without dimensionality reduction already achieves decent performance on tabular data, in contrast to the results of using existing toolboxes like scikit-learn. Further equipping NCA with deep representations and additional training stochasticity significantly enhances its capability, being on par with the leading tree-based method CatBoost and outperforming existing deep tabular models in both classification and regression tasks on 300 datasets. We conclude our paper by analyzing the factors behind these improvements, including loss functions, prediction strategies, and deep architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/qile2000/LAMDA-TALENT.

Hollmann et al. (Nature 637 (2025) 319-326) recently introduced TabPFN, a transformer-based deep learning model for regression and classification on tabular data, which they claim "outperforms all previous methods on datasets with up to 10,000 samples by a wide margin, using substantially less training time." Furthermore, they have called TabPFN a "foundation model" for tabular data, as it can support "data generation, density estimation, learning reusable embeddings and fine-tuning". In this paper, we provide a tailored explanation of how TabPFN works for a statistics audience, by emphasizing its interpretation as approximate Bayesian inference. We then explore the significance of TabPFN to the field of statistics: We show that an out-of-the-box application of TabPFN can sometimes outperform specialized state-of-the-art methods for semi-supervised parameter estimation, prediction under covariate shift, and heterogeneous treatment effect estimation. As a partial explanation for the predictive effectiveness of TabPFN, we show that it can simultaneously adapt to both nonparametric structure and parametric structure, for instance, sometimes outperforming LASSO even when assumptions are correctly specified. All experiments can be reproduced using the code provided at https://github.com/qinglong-tian/tabpfn_study (https://github.com/qinglong-tian/tabpfn_study).

Tabular data prediction is a fundamental machine learning task for many applications. Existing methods predominantly employ discriminative modeling and operate under the assumption of a fixed target column, necessitating re-training for every new predictive task. Inspired by the generative power of large language models (LLMs), this paper exploits the idea of building universal tabular data predictors based on generative modeling, namely UniPredict. Here, we demonstrate the scalability of an LLM to extensive tabular datasets, enabling it to comprehend diverse tabular inputs and predict target variables following the provided instructions. Specifically, we train a single LLM on an aggregation of 169 tabular datasets with diverse targets and compare its performance against baselines that are trained on each dataset separately. We observe this versatile UniPredict model demonstrates an advantage over other models, ranging from 5.4% to 13.4%, when compared with the best tree-boosting baseline and the best neural network baseline, respectively. We further test UniPredict in few-shot learning settings on another 62 tabular datasets. Our method achieves strong performance in quickly adapting to new tasks. In low-resource few-shot setup, we observed a 100%+ performance advantage compared with XGBoost, and significant margin over all baselines. We envision that UniPredict sheds light on developing a universal tabular data prediction system that learns from data at scale and serves a wide range of prediction tasks.

We propose a simple auto-encoder framework for molecule generation. The molecular graph is first encoded into a continuous latent representation z, which is then decoded back to a molecule. The encoding process is easy, but the decoding process remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a simple two-step decoding process. In a first step, a fully connected neural network uses the latent vector z to produce a molecular formula, for example CO_2 (one carbon and two oxygen atoms). In a second step, a graph convolutional neural network uses the same latent vector z to place bonds between the atoms that were produced in the first step (for example a double bond will be placed between the carbon and each of the oxygens). This two-step process, in which a bag of atoms is first generated, and then assembled, provides a simple framework that allows us to develop an efficient molecule auto-encoder. Numerical experiments on basic tasks such as novelty, uniqueness, validity and optimized chemical property for the 250k ZINC molecules demonstrate the performances of the proposed system. Particularly, we achieve the highest reconstruction rate of 90.5\%, improving the previous rate of 76.7\%. We also report the best property improvement results when optimization is constrained by the molecular distance between the original and generated molecules.

The text encoder is a critical component of text-to-image and text-to-video diffusion models, fundamentally determining the semantic fidelity of the generated content. However, its development has been hindered by two major challenges: the lack of an efficient evaluation framework that reliably predicts downstream generation performance, and the difficulty of effectively adapting pretrained language models for visual synthesis. To address these issues, we introduce GRAN-TED, a paradigm to Generate Robust, Aligned, and Nuanced Text Embeddings for Diffusion models. Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose TED-6K, a novel text-only benchmark that enables efficient and robust assessment of an encoder's representational quality without requiring costly end-to-end model training. We demonstrate that performance on TED-6K, standardized via a lightweight, unified adapter, strongly correlates with an encoder's effectiveness in downstream generation tasks. Notably, under our experimental setup, compared with training a diffusion model from scratch, evaluating with TED-6K is about 750times faster. Second, guided by this validated framework, we develop a superior text encoder using a novel two-stage training paradigm. This process involves an initial fine-tuning stage on a Multimodal Large Language Model for better visual representation, followed by a layer-wise weighting method to extract more nuanced and potent text features. Our experiments show that the resulting GRAN-TED encoder not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on TED-6K but also leads to demonstrable performance gains in text-to-image and text-to-video generation. Our TED-6K dataset and evaluation code are available at the following link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GRAN-TED-4FCC/.

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.

Deep graph generative modeling has proven capable of learning the distribution of complex, multi-scale structures characterizing real-world graphs. However, one of the main limitations of existing methods is their large output space, which limits generation scalability and hinders accurate modeling of the underlying distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach that significantly reduces the output space of existing graph generative models. Specifically, starting from the observation that many real-world graphs have low graph bandwidth, we restrict graph bandwidth during training and generation. Our strategy improves both generation scalability and quality without increasing architectural complexity or reducing expressiveness. Our approach is compatible with existing graph generative methods, and we describe its application to both autoregressive and one-shot models. We extensively validate our strategy on synthetic and real datasets, including molecular graphs. Our experiments show that, in addition to improving generation efficiency, our approach consistently improves generation quality and reconstruction accuracy. The implementation is made available.

Graph is powerful for representing various types of real-world data. The topology (edges' presence) and edges' features of a graph decides the message passing mechanism among vertices within the graph. While most existing approaches only manually define a single-value edge to describe the connectivity or strength of association between a pair of vertices, task-specific and crucial relationship cues may be disregarded by such manually defined topology and single-value edge features. In this paper, we propose the first general graph representation learning framework (called GRATIS) which can generate a strong graph representation with a task-specific topology and task-specific multi-dimensional edge features from any arbitrary input. To learn each edge's presence and multi-dimensional feature, our framework takes both of the corresponding vertices pair and their global contextual information into consideration, enabling the generated graph representation to have a globally optimal message passing mechanism for different down-stream tasks. The principled investigation results achieved for various graph analysis tasks on 11 graph and non-graph datasets show that our GRATIS can not only largely enhance pre-defined graphs but also learns a strong graph representation for non-graph data, with clear performance improvements on all tasks. In particular, the learned topology and multi-dimensional edge features provide complementary task-related cues for graph analysis tasks. Our framework is effective, robust and flexible, and is a plug-and-play module that can be combined with different backbones and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generate a task-specific graph representation from various graph and non-graph data. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/SSYSteve/Learning-Graph-Representation-with-Task-specific-Topology-and-Multi-dimensional-Edge-Features.

Self-supervision is often used for pre-training to foster performance on a downstream task by constructing meaningful representations of samples. Self-supervised learning (SSL) generally involves generating different views of the same sample and thus requires data augmentations that are challenging to construct for tabular data. This constitutes one of the main challenges of self-supervision for structured data. In the present work, we propose a novel augmentation-free SSL method for tabular data. Our approach, T-JEPA, relies on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and is akin to mask reconstruction in the latent space. It involves predicting the latent representation of one subset of features from the latent representation of a different subset within the same sample, thereby learning rich representations without augmentations. We use our method as a pre-training technique and train several deep classifiers on the obtained representation. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both classification and regression tasks, outperforming models trained directly on samples in their original data space. Moreover, T-JEPA enables some methods to consistently outperform or match the performance of traditional methods likes Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. To understand why, we extensively characterize the obtained representations and show that T-JEPA effectively identifies relevant features for downstream tasks without access to the labels. Additionally, we introduce regularization tokens, a novel regularization method critical for training of JEPA-based models on structured data.

Benchmarks that closely reflect downstream application scenarios are essential for the streamlined adoption of new research in tabular machine learning (ML). In this work, we examine existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of industry-grade tabular data that are underrepresented in the datasets available to the academic community. First, tabular data often changes over time in real-world deployment scenarios. This impacts model performance and requires time-based train and test splits for correct model evaluation. Yet, existing academic tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. For each specific dataset, this can have a different impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features, which in turn can affect model selection. To fill the aforementioned gaps in academic benchmarks, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets covering a wide range of domains from finance to food delivery services. We assess a large number of tabular ML models in the feature-rich, temporally-evolving data setting facilitated by TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits more common in academic benchmarks. Furthermore, on the TabReD datasets, MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results, while more sophisticated DL models are yet to prove their effectiveness.

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.

Plane geometry problem solving (PGPS) has recently gained significant attention as a benchmark to assess the multi-modal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models. Despite the growing interest in PGPS, the research community still lacks a comprehensive overview that systematically synthesizes recent work in PGPS. To fill this gap, we present a survey of existing PGPS studies. We first categorize PGPS methods into an encoder-decoder framework and summarize the corresponding output formats used by their encoders and decoders. Subsequently, we classify and analyze these encoders and decoders according to their architectural designs. Finally, we outline major challenges and promising directions for future research. In particular, we discuss the hallucination issues arising during the encoding phase within encoder-decoder architectures, as well as the problem of data leakage in current PGPS benchmarks.

The task of converting a natural language question into an executable SQL query, known as text-to-SQL, is an important branch of semantic parsing. The state-of-the-art graph-based encoder has been successfully used in this task but does not model the question syntax well. In this paper, we propose S^2SQL, injecting Syntax to question-Schema graph encoder for Text-to-SQL parsers, which effectively leverages the syntactic dependency information of questions in text-to-SQL to improve the performance. We also employ the decoupling constraint to induce diverse relational edge embedding, which further improves the network's performance. Experiments on the Spider and robustness setting Spider-Syn demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms all existing methods when pre-training models are used, resulting in a performance ranks first on the Spider leaderboard.

It is well-established that large, diverse datasets play a pivotal role in the performance of modern AI systems for text and image modalities. However, there are no datasets for tabular data of comparable size and diversity to those available for text and images. Thus we present "TabLib'', a compilation of 627 million tables totaling 69 TiB, along with 867B tokens of context. TabLib was extracted from numerous file formats, including CSV, HTML, SQLite, PDF, Excel, and others, sourced from GitHub and Common Crawl. The size and diversity of TabLib offer considerable promise in the table modality, reminiscent of the original promise of foundational datasets for text and images, such as The Pile and LAION.

While many EDA tasks already involve graph-based data, existing LLMs in EDA primarily either represent graphs as sequential text, or simply ignore graph-structured data that might be beneficial like dataflow graphs of RTL code. Recent studies have found that LLM performance suffers when graphs are represented as sequential text, and using additional graph information significantly boosts performance. To address these challenges, we introduce BRIDGES, a framework designed to incorporate graph modality into LLMs for EDA tasks. BRIDGES integrates an automated data generation workflow, a solution that combines graph modality with LLM, and a comprehensive evaluation suite. First, we establish an LLM-driven workflow to generate RTL and netlist-level data, converting them into dataflow and netlist graphs with function descriptions. This workflow yields a large-scale dataset comprising over 500,000 graph instances and more than 1.5 billion tokens. Second, we propose a lightweight cross-modal projector that encodes graph representations into text-compatible prompts, enabling LLMs to effectively utilize graph data without architectural modifications. Experimental results demonstrate 2x to 10x improvements across multiple tasks compared to text-only baselines, including accuracy in design retrieval, type prediction and perplexity in function description, with negligible computational overhead (<1% model weights increase and <30% additional runtime overhead). Even without additional LLM finetuning, our results outperform text-only by a large margin. We plan to release BRIDGES, including the dataset, models, and training flow.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has become a powerful tool for learning graph data, but its scalability remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective training framework called Structural Compression (StructComp) to address this issue. Inspired by a sparse low-rank approximation on the diffusion matrix, StructComp trains the encoder with the compressed nodes. This allows the encoder not to perform any message passing during the training stage, and significantly reduces the number of sample pairs in the contrastive loss. We theoretically prove that the original GCL loss can be approximated with the contrastive loss computed by StructComp. Moreover, StructComp can be regarded as an additional regularization term for GCL models, resulting in a more robust encoder. Empirical studies on seven benchmark datasets show that StructComp greatly reduces the time and memory consumption while improving model performance compared to the vanilla GCL models and scalable training methods.

Charts provide visual representations of data and are widely used for analyzing information, addressing queries, and conveying insights to others. Various chart-related downstream tasks have emerged recently, such as question-answering and summarization. A common strategy to solve these tasks is to fine-tune various models originally trained on vision tasks language. However, such task-specific models are not capable of solving a wide range of chart-related tasks, constraining their real-world applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ChartInstruct: a novel chart-specific vision-language Instruction-following dataset comprising 191K instructions generated with 71K charts. We then present two distinct systems for instruction tuning on such datasets: (1) an end-to-end model that connects a vision encoder for chart understanding with a LLM; and (2) a pipeline model that employs a two-step approach to extract chart data tables and input them into the LLM. In experiments on four downstream tasks, we first show the effectiveness of our model--achieving a new set of state-of-the-art results. Further evaluation shows that our instruction-tuning approach supports a wide array of real-world chart comprehension and reasoning scenarios, thereby expanding the scope and applicability of our models to new kinds of tasks.

Graphs are ubiquitous structures found in numerous real-world applications, such as drug discovery, recommender systems, and social network analysis. To model graph-structured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a popular tool. However, existing GNN architectures encounter challenges in cross-graph learning where multiple graphs have different feature spaces. To address this, recent approaches introduce text-attributed graphs (TAGs), where each node is associated with a textual description, which can be projected into a unified feature space using textual encoders. While promising, this method relies heavily on the availability of text-attributed graph data, which is difficult to obtain in practice. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel method named Topology-Aware Node description Synthesis (TANS), leveraging large language models (LLMs) to convert existing graphs into text-attributed graphs. The key idea is to integrate topological information into LLMs to explain how graph topology influences node semantics. We evaluate our TANS on text-rich, text-limited, and text-free graphs, demonstrating its applicability. Notably, on text-free graphs, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches that manually design node features, showcasing the potential of LLMs for preprocessing graph-structured data in the absence of textual information. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/TANS.

Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.

Graph Structure Learning (GSL) focuses on capturing intrinsic dependencies and interactions among nodes in graph-structured data by generating novel graph structures. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as promising GSL solutions, utilizing recursive message passing to encode node-wise inter-dependencies. However, many existing GSL methods heavily depend on explicit graph structural information as supervision signals, leaving them susceptible to challenges such as data noise and sparsity. In this work, we propose GraphEdit, an approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to learn complex node relationships in graph-structured data. By enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through instruction-tuning over graph structures, we aim to overcome the limitations associated with explicit graph structural information and enhance the reliability of graph structure learning. Our approach not only effectively denoises noisy connections but also identifies node-wise dependencies from a global perspective, providing a comprehensive understanding of the graph structure. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of GraphEdit across various settings. We have made our model implementation available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphEdit.

Transformers were originally proposed as a sequence-to-sequence model for text but have become vital for a wide range of modalities, including images, audio, video, and undirected graphs. However, transformers for directed graphs are a surprisingly underexplored topic, despite their applicability to ubiquitous domains including source code and logic circuits. In this work, we propose two direction- and structure-aware positional encodings for directed graphs: (1) the eigenvectors of the Magnetic Laplacian - a direction-aware generalization of the combinatorial Laplacian; (2) directional random walk encodings. Empirically, we show that the extra directionality information is useful in various downstream tasks, including correctness testing of sorting networks and source code understanding. Together with a data-flow-centric graph construction, our model outperforms the prior state of the art on the Open Graph Benchmark Code2 relatively by 14.7%.

The analysis of tabular data has traditionally been dominated by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs), known for their proficiency with mixed categorical and numerical features. However, recent deep learning innovations are challenging this dominance. We introduce Mambular, an adaptation of the Mamba architecture optimized for tabular data. We extensively benchmark Mambular against state-of-the-art models, including neural networks and tree-based methods, and demonstrate its competitive performance across diverse datasets. Additionally, we explore various adaptations of Mambular to understand its effectiveness for tabular data. We investigate different pooling strategies, feature interaction mechanisms, and bi-directional processing. Our analysis shows that interpreting features as a sequence and passing them through Mamba layers results in surprisingly performant models. The results highlight Mambulars potential as a versatile and powerful architecture for tabular data analysis, expanding the scope of deep learning applications in this domain. The source code is available at https://github.com/basf/mamba-tabular.

We present TableSeq, an image-only, end-to-end framework for joint table structure recognition, content recognition, and cell localization. The model formulates these tasks as a single sequence-generation problem: one decoder produces an interleaved stream of HTML tags, cell text, and discretized coordinate tokens, thereby aligning logical structure, textual content, and cell geometry within a unified autoregressive sequence. This design avoids external OCR, auxiliary decoders, and complex multi-stage post-processing. TableSeq combines a lightweight high-resolution FCN-H16 encoder with a minimal structure-prior head and a single-layer transformer encoder, yielding a compact architecture that remains effective on challenging layouts. Across standard benchmarks, TableSeq achieves competitive or state-of-the-art results while preserving architectural simplicity. It reaches 95.23 TEDS / 96.83 S-TEDS on PubTabNet, 97.45 TEDS / 98.69 S-TEDS on FinTabNet, and 99.79 / 99.54 / 99.66 precision / recall / F1 on SciTSR under the CAR protocol, while remaining competitive on PubTables-1M under GriTS. Beyond TSR/TCR, the same sequence interface generalizes to index-based table querying without task-specific heads, achieving the best IRDR score and competitive ICDR/ICR performance. We also study multi-token prediction for faster blockwise decoding and show that it reduces inference latency with only limited accuracy degradation. Overall, TableSeq provides a practical and reproducible single-stream baseline for unified table recognition, and the source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/hamdilaziz/TableSeq.