Beyond Distribution Matching: Semantics-Consistent Tabular Diffusion with Weak Semantic Priors

arXiv:2609.16069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data can match real data distributions while still violating the semantic constraints that govern valid tabular rows. This reveals a key limitation of existing tabular generators: they mainly optimize distributional fidelity, but do not explicitly model weak semantic priors encoded in tabular schema and textual descriptions. In this paper, we propose ours, a semantics-consistent tabular diffusion framework for high-fidelity synthetic data generation under weakly specified semantic priors. ours first constructs two types of priors, namely intra-column semantics and inter-column symbolic rules, with LLM-assisted extraction from metadata and validation on the real training split. These priors are then used as generation conditions rather than post-hoc filters. Specifically, ours maps heterogeneous column values, column identities, and semantic priors into a unified semantic space, and performs column-wise forward corruption and prior-conditioned reverse denoising to preserve both marginal distributions and rule-consistent cross-column dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world tabular benchmarks show that ours consistently improves distributional fidelity, semantic consistency, and downstream task utility over representative VAE-, GAN-, LLM-, and diffusion-based baselines. Additional analyses further demonstrate the robustness of ours when semantic priors are partially unavailable.

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Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-16