TabM: Advancing tabular deep learning with parameter-efficient ensembling

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission14197 Authors

Keywords: tabular, tabular data, deep learning, architecture

TL;DR: Parameter-efficient ensembling has a massive positive impact on tabular MLPs, and TabM is a new SOTA architecture illustrating that.

Abstract:

Deep learning architectures for supervised learning on tabular data range from simple multilayer perceptrons (MLP) to sophisticated Transformers and retrieval-augmented methods.
This study highlights a major, yet so far overlooked opportunity for substantially improving tabular MLPs; namely, parameter-efficient ensembling -- a paradigm for imitating an ensemble of models with just one model.
We start by describing TabM -- a simple model based on MLP and BatchEnsemble (an existing technique), improved with our custom modifications.
Then, we perform a large scale evaluation of tabular DL architectures on public benchmarks in terms of both task performance and efficiency, which renders the landscape of tabular DL in a new light.
In particular, we find that TabM outperforms prior tabular DL models, while the complexity of attention- and retrieval-based methods does not pay off.
Lastly, we conduct a detailed empirical analysis, that sheds some light on the high performance of TabM.
For example, we show that parameter-efficient ensembling is not an arbitrary trick, but rather a highly effective way to reduce overfitting and improve optimization dynamics of tabular MLPs.
Overall, our work brings an impactful technique to tabular DL, analyses its behaviour, and advances the performance-efficiency tradeoff with TabM -- a simple and powerful baseline for researchers and practitioners.

Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)

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Submission Number: 14197