Why Tabular Foundation Models Should Be a Research Priority

Understand

Recent text and image foundation models are incredibly impressive, and these models are attracting an ever-increasing portion of research resources.

• In this position piece we aim to shift the ML research community's priorities ever so slightly to a different modality: tabular data.
• Tabular data is the dominant modality in many fields, yet it is given hardly any research attention and significantly lags behind in terms of scale and power.
• We believe the time is now to start developing tabular foundation models, or what we coin a Large Tabular Model (LTM).