# LaTable: Towards Large Tabular Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17673 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17673/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [Tabular Data: Deep Learning is Not All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03253/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [Assessing Generative Models via Precision and Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00035/) (2018)
- [TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15421/) (2022)
- [Language Models are Realistic Tabular Data Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06280/) (2022)
- [Continuous diffusion for categorical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15089/) (2022)
- [Generating Multi-label Discrete Patient Records using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06490/) (2017)
- [Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09656/) (2023)
- [OpenML Benchmarking Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03731/) (2017)
- [Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01147/) (2024)
- [REaLTabFormer: Generating Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02041/) (2023)
- [Tabular Transformers for Modeling Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01843/) (2020)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Synthetic Data through Overfitting Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12580/) (2023)
- [Adversarial random forests for density estimation and generative modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09435/) (2022)
- [TabuLa: Harnessing Language Models for Tabular Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12746/) (2023)
- [Can You Rely on Your Model Evaluation? Improving Model Evaluation with Synthetic Test Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16524/) (2023)
- [Beyond Privacy: Navigating the Opportunities and Challenges of Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03722/) (2023)
- [TabLib: A Dataset of 627M Tables with Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07875/) (2023)
- [Conditional Synthetic Data Generation for Robust Machine Learning Applications with Limited Pandemic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06486/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [TabDPT: Scaling Tabular Foundation Models on Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18164/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Engineer Too Many Simple Features For Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17787/) (2024)
- [LLM-TabLogic: Preserving Inter-Column Logical Relationships in Synthetic Tabular Data via Prompt-Guided Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02161/) (2025)
- [In-context Learning of Evolving Data Streams with Tabular Foundational Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16840/) (2025)
- [ExplainerPFN: Towards tabular foundation models for model-free zero-shot feature importance estimations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23068/) (2026)
- [TabFORGE: A Tabular Foundation Model for Generative Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09424/) (2026)
- [iLTM: Integrated Large Tabular Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15941/) (2025)
- [CDMD: A Cross-Dataset Mixed-Type Diffusion Model for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39124/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tabular data is one of the most ubiquitous modalities, yet the literature on tabular generative foundation models is lagging far behind its text and vision counterparts. Creating such a model is hard, due to the heterogeneous feature spaces of different tabular datasets, tabular metadata (e.g. dataset description and feature headers), and tables lacking prior knowledge (e.g. feature order). In this work we propose LaTable: a novel tabular diffusion model that addresses these challenges and can be trained across different datasets. Through extensive experiments we find that LaTable outperforms baselines on in-distribution generation, and that finetuning LaTable can generate out-of-distribution datasets better with fewer samples. On the other hand, we explore the poor zero-shot performance of LaTable, and what it may teach us about building generative tabular foundation models with better zero- and few-shot generation capabilities.