TabFM: A Zero-Shot Foundation Model for Tabular Data

arXiv:2609.37959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular machine learning typically relies on per-dataset workflows, fitting tree ensembles or running AutoML searches from scratch for every task. We present TabFM, a 400M-parameter tabular foundation model that formulates supervised tabular prediction as in-context learning. TabFM produces calibrated zero-shot predictions in a single forward pass without task-specific tuning. Trained entirely on synthetic tables generated from structural causal models, TabFM learns general tabular representations that transfer zero-shot to real-world tasks. Across all 51 benchmark datasets in TabArena (38 classification and 13 regression), zero-shot TabFM ranks first among default tabular foundation models and outperforms tuned AutoML pipelines. Two extensions over the same frozen weights improve performance further on both tracks: multi-view feature expansion with ensembling and post-hoc calibration (TabFM+), and LLM-guided, dataset-specific data processing and feature engineering (TabFM-Auto).

Related

• TabFM-Auto: Self-Evolving Pipelines for Tabular Foundation Models
• What Do Tabular Foundation Models Compute In Context? In-Situ Representation Refinement through Attention-Gated Updates
• Prior-Aligned Data Cleaning for Tabular Foundation Models
• TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-09-30