TabPFN Extensions for Interpretable Geotechnical Modelling

arXiv:2603.21033v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Geotechnical site characterisation relies on sparse, heterogeneous borehole data, where uncertainty quantification and interpretability matter as much as predictive accuracy. We evaluate TabPFN~itep{Hollmann2025}, a tabular foundation model, and its exttt{tabpfn-extensions} library on two geotechnical tasks: (1) soil-type classification from N-value and shear-wave velocity data as a controlled illustrative case, and (2) iterative imputation of five mechanical parameters (s_u, E_{u}, {sigma'}_p, C_c, C_v) in BM/AirportSoilProperties/2/2025. Without retraining, we apply cosine-similarity analysis to TabPFN embeddings, visualise predictive distributions, and compute SHAP attributions. On the regression benchmark we compare TabPFN with mean imputation, linear regression, random forests, XGBoost, and HBM; introduce a proxy decomposition of predictive uncertainty across context-perturbation classes; and propagate marginal C_c and {sigma'}_p distributions through a one-dimensional consolidation model to obtain the reliability index eta and serviceability exceedance probability P_f. Embeddings exhibit label-consistent Clay/Sand grouping; iterative imputation reduces RMSE for all five targets, with TabPFN lowest on four; SHAP attributions are consistent with the Skempton compression-index correlation and the inverse preconsolidation-pressure-water-content dependence; the within-posterior component is largest in the proxy decomposition. We position the contribution as a worked evaluation workflow that may complement established methods for data-scarce geotechnics, not as algorithmic innovation.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-05-21