# A Sobering Look at Tabular Data Generation via Probabilistic Circuits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23016 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23016/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01848/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Transformers Can Do Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10510/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Realistic Tabular Data Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06280/) (2022)
- [A note on the evaluation of generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01844/) (2015)
- [TabICL: A Tabular Foundation Model for In-Context Learning on Large Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05564/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Classifier Two-Sample Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06545/) (2016)
- [How Faithful is your Synthetic Data? Sample-level Metrics for Evaluating and Auditing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08921/) (2021)
- [Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09656/) (2023)
- [TabArena: A Living Benchmark for Machine Learning on Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16791/) (2025)
- [Handling Incomplete Heterogeneous Data using VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03653/) (2018)
- [Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01147/) (2024)
- [Einsum Networks: Fast and Scalable Learning of Tractable Probabilistic Circuits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06231/) (2020)
- [Semantic Probabilistic Layers for Neuro-Symbolic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00426/) (2022)
- [A Differential Approach to Inference in Bayesian Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3847/) (2013)
- [Synthesizing Tabular Data using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11264/) (2018)
- [EDDI: Efficient Dynamic Discovery of High-Value Information with Partial VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11142/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Synthcity: facilitating innovative use cases of synthetic data in different data modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07573/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Measuring the Dependency Gap: Diagnosing Inter-Column Fidelity in Tabular Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21636/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tabular data is more challenging to generate than text and images, due to its heterogeneous features and much lower sample sizes. On this task, diffusion-based models are the current state-of-the-art (SotA) model class, achieving almost perfect performance on commonly used benchmarks. In this paper, we question the perception of progress for tabular data generation. First, we highlight the limitations of current protocols to evaluate the fidelity of generated data, and advocate for alternative ones. Next, we revisit a simple baseline -- hierarchical mixture models in the form of deep probabilistic circuits (PCs) -- which delivers competitive or superior performance to SotA models for a fraction of the cost. PCs are the generative counterpart of decision forests, and as such can natively handle heterogeneous data as well as deliver tractable probabilistic generation and inference. Finally, in a rigorous empirical analysis we show that the apparent saturation of progress for SotA models is largely due to the use of inadequate metrics. As such, we highlight that there is still much to be done to generate realistic tabular data. Code available at https://github.com/april-tools/tabpc.