SYNTHONY: A Stress-Aware, Intent-Conditioned Agent for Deep Tabular Generative Models Selection

Hochan Son, Xiaofeng Lin, Jason Ni, Guang Cheng

Keywords: tabular data synthesis, model selection, meta-learning, stress profiling, deep generative models

Abstract:

Deep generative models for tabular data (GANs, diffusion models, and LLM-based generators) exhibit highly non-uniform behavior across datasets: the best-performing model family depends strongly on distributional stressors such as long-tailed marginals, high-cardinality categoricals, Zipfian imbalance, and small-sample regimes. This brittleness makes practical deployment challenging, especially when users must balance competing objectives across fidelity, privacy, and utility.

We study \emph{intent-conditioned tabular synthesis selection}: given a dataset and a user intent expressed as a preference over evaluation metrics, the goal is to select a synthesizer that minimizes regret relative to an intent-specific oracle. We propose \textbf{stress profiling}, a synthesis-specific meta-feature representation that quantifies dataset difficulty along four interpretable stress dimensions, and integrate it into \textbf{SYNTHONY}, a selection framework that matches stress profiles against a calibrated capability registry of synthesizer families. Across a benchmark of 7 datasets, 10 synthesizers, and 3 intents, we demonstrate that stress-based meta-features are highly predictive of synthesizer performance: a kNN selector using these features achieves strong Top-1 selection accuracy, substantially outperforming zero-shot LLM selectors and random baselines. We analyze the gap between meta-feature-based and capability-based selection, identifying the hand-crafted capability registry as the primary bottleneck and motivating learned capability representations as the path forward.

Submission Number: 111