arXiv:2505.17918cs.LG2025-05NeurIPS被引 7

用大模型生成决策树规则,提升表格数据预测效果

LLM Meeting Decision Trees on Tabular Data

  • 让大模型生成决策树规则,替代传统表格转文本
  • 无需微调大模型,在全量数据上实现高精度预测
  • 适合需要隐私保护与高效推理的表格数据场景

表格数据在医疗、金融等众多现实领域中具有关键作用。随着大语言模型(LLM)的成功,已有研究尝试将LLM应用于表格数据领域。然而,现有方法通常先将表格数据序列化为自然语言描述,再进行微调或直接推理,面临两大核心问题:(i) 数据层面:现有序列化方法缺乏通用性,且可能因直接暴露文本内容带来隐私风险;(ii) 模型层面:LLM微调在表格数据上表现不佳,且上下文学习受限于输入长度,难以扩展至多样本场景。本文提出一种新范式:通过逻辑决策树规则作为中介,将大模型融入表格数据处理,构建基于大模型生成规则的决策树增强器DeLTa。该方法避免了表格数据的序列化,可在无微调的全量数据学习设置下运行。具体而言,利用大模型的推理能力,对一组已有决策树规则进行重构优化;同时设计校准方法,通过大模型生成的新规则逼近误差修正向量,引导原始决策树预测向减少错误方向调整。在多个典型表格基准上的广泛实验表明,该方法达到当前最优性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tabular data have been playing a vital role in diverse real-world fields, including healthcare, finance, etc. With the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), early explorations of extending LLMs to the domain of tabular data have been developed. Most of these LLM-based methods typically first serialize tabular data into natural language descriptions, and then tune LLMs or directly infer on these serialized data. However, these methods suffer from two key inherent issues: (i) data perspective: existing data serialization methods lack universal applicability for structured tabular data, and may pose privacy risks through direct textual exposure, and (ii) model perspective: LLM fine-tuning methods struggle with tabular data, and in-context learning scalability is bottle-necked by input length constraints (suitable for few-shot learning). This work explores a novel direction of integrating LLMs into tabular data throughough logical decision tree rules as intermediaries, proposes a decision tree enhancer with LLM-derived rule for tabular prediction, DeLTa. The proposed DeLTa avoids tabular data serialization, and can be applied to full data learning setting without LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, we leverage the reasoning ability of LLMs to redesign an improved rule given a set of decision tree rules. Furthermore, we provide a calibration method for original decision trees via new generated rule by LLM, which approximates the error correction vector to steer the original decision tree predictions in the direction of ``errors'' reducing. Finally, extensive experiments on diverse tabular benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

大模型决策树表格数据规则生成

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