Exploring Fine-Tuning for Tabular Foundation Models

摘要

Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently shown strong in-context learning capabilities on structured data, achieving zero-shot performance comparable to traditional machine learning methods. We find that zero-shot TFMs already achieve strong performance, while the benefits of fine-tuning are highly model- and data-dependent. Meta-learning and PEFT provide moderate gains under specific conditions, whereas full supervised fine-tuning often reduces accuracy or calibration quality. This work presents the first comprehensive study of fine-tuning in TFMs across benchmarks including TALENT, OpenML-CC18, and TabZilla. We compare zero-shot, meta-learning, supervised (SFT), and parameter-efficient (PEFT) approaches, analyzing how dataset factors such as imbalance, size, and dimensionality affect outcomes. Our findings cover performance, calibration, and fairness, offering practical guidelines on when fine-tuning is most beneficial and its limitations.