# CausalDiffTab: Mixed-Type Causal-Aware Diffusion for Tabular Data Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09656/) (2023)
- [Handling Missing Data with Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16418/) (2020)
- [STaSy: Score-based Tabular data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04018/) (2022)
- [CoDi: Co-evolving Contrastive Diffusion Models for Mixed-type Tabular Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12654/) (2023)
- [Diffusion models for missing value imputation in tabular data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17128/) (2022)
- [TabDiff: a Mixed-type Diffusion Model for Tabular Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20626/) (2024)
- [EditWorld: Simulating World Dynamics for Instruction-Following Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14785/) (2024)
- [SOS: Score-based Oversampling for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08555/) (2022)
- [Do Generated Data Always Help Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12448/) (2024)
- [DiffPO: A causal diffusion model for learning distributions of potential outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08924/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models via Deconvolution in Subspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01419/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Improving TabPFN's Synthetic Data Generation by Integrating Causal Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10254/) (2026)
- [Dependency-aware synthetic tabular data generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19211/) (2025)
- [Portable Causal Fairness Across Synthetic Data Generator Families](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03180/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training data has been proven to be one of the most critical components in training generative AI. However, obtaining high-quality data remains challenging, with data privacy issues presenting a significant hurdle. To address the need for high-quality data. Synthesize data has emerged as a mainstream solution, demonstrating impressive performance in areas such as images, audio, and video. Generating mixed-type data, especially high-quality tabular data, still faces significant challenges. These primarily include its inherent heterogeneous data types, complex inter-variable relationships, and intricate column-wise distributions. In this paper, we introduce CausalDiffTab, a diffusion model-based generative model specifically designed to handle mixed tabular data containing both numerical and categorical features, while being more flexible in capturing complex interactions among variables. We further propose a hybrid adaptive causal regularization method based on the principle of Hierarchical Prior Fusion. This approach adaptively controls the weight of causal regularization, enhancing the model's performance without compromising its generative capabilities. Comprehensive experiments conducted on seven datasets demonstrate that CausalDiffTab outperforms baseline methods across all metrics. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Godz-z/CausalDiffTab.