# Attention augmented differentiable forest for tabular data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02921 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02921/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on tabular data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08815/) (2022)
- [GRANDE: Gradient-Based Decision Tree Ensembles for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17130/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Differentiable forest is an ensemble of decision trees with full differentiability. Its simple tree structure is easy to use and explain. With full differentiability, it would be trained in the end-to-end learning framework with gradient-based optimization method. In this paper, we propose tree attention block(TAB) in the framework of differentiable forest. TAB block has two operations, squeeze and regulate. The squeeze operation would extract the characteristic of each tree. The regulate operation would learn nonlinear relations between these trees. So TAB block would learn the importance of each tree and adjust its weight to improve accuracy. Our experiment on large tabular dataset shows attention augmented differentiable forest would get comparable accuracy with gradient boosted decision trees(GBDT), which is the state-of-the-art algorithm for tabular datasets. And on some datasets, our model has higher accuracy than best GBDT libs (LightGBM, Catboost, and XGBoost). Differentiable forest model supports batch training and batch size is much smaller than the size of training set. So on larger data sets, its memory usage is much lower than GBDT model. The source codes are available at https://github.com/closest-git/QuantumForest.