让表格模型在大样本上用上下文学习,速度快10倍且精度更高。
TabICL: A Tabular Foundation Model for In-Context Learning on Large Data
- 两阶段结构:先列后行注意力生成固定长度行向量,再用Transformer高效实现上下文学习。
- 可处理50万样本,200个数据集上性能媲美顶尖模型,最快提升10倍。
- 适合需要快速推理的大规模表格分类任务,尤其适合资源有限的场景。
传统梯度提升树在表格数据上长期占优,但基于上下文学习(ICL)的表格基础模型正带来挑战:将训练数据作为测试数据的上下文,在单次前向传播中预测,无需参数更新。尽管TabPFNv2在1万样本内表现优异,其交替的列-行注意力机制导致大规模训练集计算成本过高。为此,我们提出TabICL,一种针对分类任务的表格基础模型,预训练于最大6万样本的合成数据集,可在低成本设备上处理50万样本。该模型采用新颖的两阶段架构:先通过列-行注意力构建固定维度的行嵌入,再使用Transformer实现高效ICL。在TALENT基准的200个分类数据集上,TabICL性能与TabPFNv2相当,但系统性更快(最高提速10倍),显著优于所有其他方法。在53个超过1万样本的数据集上,其表现超越了TabPFNv2和CatBoost,验证了ICL在大规模表格数据中的潜力。预训练代码、推理代码及模型已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The long-standing dominance of gradient-boosted decision trees on tabular data is currently challenged by tabular foundation models using In-Context Learning (ICL): setting the training data as context for the test data and predicting in a single forward pass without parameter updates. While TabPFNv2 foundation model excels on tables with up to 10K samples, its alternating column- and row-wise attentions make handling large training sets computationally prohibitive. So, can ICL be effectively scaled and deliver a benefit for larger tables? We introduce TabICL, a tabular foundation model for classification, pretrained on synthetic datasets with up to 60K samples and capable of handling 500K samples on affordable resources. This is enabled by a novel two-stage architecture: a column-then-row attention mechanism to build fixed-dimensional embeddings of rows, followed by a transformer for efficient ICL. Across 200 classification datasets from the TALENT benchmark, TabICL is on par with TabPFNv2 while being systematically faster (up to 10 times), and significantly outperforms all other approaches. On 53 datasets with over 10K samples, TabICL surpasses both TabPFNv2 and CatBoost, demonstrating the potential of ICL for large data. Pretraining code, inference code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/soda-inria/tabicl.
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