# KMLP: A Scalable Hybrid Architecture for Web-Scale Tabular Data Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22777/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [SAINT: Improved Neural Networks for Tabular Data via Row Attention and Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01342/) (2021)
- [CatBoost: gradient boosting with categorical features support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11363/) (2018)
- [Neural Oblivious Decision Ensembles for Deep Learning on Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06312/) (2019)
- [On Embeddings for Numerical Features in Tabular Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05556/) (2022)
- [DANets: Deep Abstract Networks for Tabular Data Classification and Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02962/) (2021)
- [An Embedding Learning Framework for Numerical Features in CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08986/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predictive modeling on web-scale tabular data with billions of instances and hundreds of heterogeneous numerical features faces significant scalability challenges. These features exhibit anisotropy, heavy-tailed distributions, and non-stationarity, creating bottlenecks for models like Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and requiring laborious manual feature engineering. We introduce KMLP, a hybrid deep architecture integrating a shallow Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) front-end with a Gated Multilayer Perceptron (gMLP) backbone. The KAN front-end uses learnable activation functions to automatically model complex non-linear transformations for each feature, while the gMLP backbone captures high-order interactions. Experiments on public benchmarks and an industrial dataset with billions of samples show KMLP achieves state-of-the-art performance, with advantages over baselines like GBDTs increasing at larger scales, validating KMLP as a scalable deep learning paradigm for large-scale web tabular data.