用大模型设计随机森林,让少样本表格数据学习更准更稳。
FORESTLLM: Large Language Models Make Random Forest Great on Few-shot Tabular Learning
- 大模型在训练时生成语义分割规则,提升树结构鲁棒性。
- 少样本下分类/回归任务性能达当前最优,超越传统方法。
- 适合需要可解释性与高精度的金融、医疗等少样本场景。
表格数据在金融、医疗和科学发现等高风险决策领域至关重要。然而,在标签样本稀缺的少样本场景下,有效学习仍是一大挑战。传统树模型依赖统计纯度指标,在监督不足时易失稳并过拟合。直接使用大语言模型(LLM)又常忽略其结构特性,导致性能不佳。为此,我们提出 FORESTLLM,将决策森林的结构归纳偏置与大模型的语义推理能力结合。关键在于:仅在训练阶段使用 LLM,作为离线模型设计器,将丰富上下文知识注入轻量、可解释的森林模型中,测试时无需调用 LLM。方法包含两部分:首先引入语义分割准则,由 LLM 基于有标签与无标签数据评估候选划分的连贯性,从而在少样本下构建更稳健、泛化更强的树结构;其次提出一次性的上下文推理机制,用于叶节点稳定,将决策路径及其支持样本提炼为简洁确定的预测结果,替代噪声较大的经验估计。在多样化的少样本分类与回归基准上,FORESTLLM 实现了当前最优性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tabular data high-stakes critical decision-making in domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific discovery. Yet, learning effectively from tabular data in few-shot settings, where labeled examples are scarce, remains a fundamental challenge. Traditional tree-based methods often falter in these regimes due to their reliance on statistical purity metrics, which become unstable and prone to overfitting with limited supervision. At the same time, direct applications of large language models (LLMs) often overlook its inherent structure, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose FORESTLLM, a novel framework that unifies the structural inductive biases of decision forests with the semantic reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Crucially, FORESTLLM leverages the LLM only during training, treating it as an offline model designer that encodes rich, contextual knowledge into a lightweight, interpretable forest model, eliminating the need for LLM inference at test time. Our method is two-fold. First, we introduce a semantic splitting criterion in which the LLM evaluates candidate partitions based on their coherence over both labeled and unlabeled data, enabling the induction of more robust and generalizable tree structures under few-shot supervision. Second, we propose a one-time in-context inference mechanism for leaf node stabilization, where the LLM distills the decision path and its supporting examples into a concise, deterministic prediction, replacing noisy empirical estimates with semantically informed outputs. Across a diverse suite of few-shot classification and regression benchmarks, FORESTLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance.
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