Multimodal Tabular Reasoning with Privileged Structured Information

Tabular reasoning involves multi-step information extraction and logical inference over tabular data. While recent advances have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over structured tables, such high-quality textual representations are often unavailable in real-world settings, where tables typically appear as images. In this paper, we tackle the task of tabular reasoning from table images, leveraging privileged structured information available during training to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The key challenges lie in the complexity of accurately aligning structured information with visual representations, and in effectively transferring structured reasoning skills to MLLMs despite the input modality gap. To address these, we introduce TabUlar Reasoning with Bridged infOrmation ({\sc Turbo}), a new framework for multimodal tabular reasoning with privileged structured tables. {\sc Turbo} benefits from a structure-aware reasoning trace generator based on DeepSeek-R1, contributing to high-quality modality-bridged data. On this basis, {\sc Turbo} repeatedly generates and selects the advantageous reasoning paths, further enhancing the model's tabular reasoning ability. Experimental results demonstrate that, with limited ($9$k) data, {\sc Turbo} achieves state-of-the-art performance ($+7.2\%$ vs. previous SOTA) across multiple datasets.

Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard

Tabular data, a fundamental data format in machine learning, is predominantly utilized in competitions and real-world applications. The performance of tabular models--such as gradient boosted decision trees and neural networks--can vary significantly across datasets due to differences in feature distributions and task characteristics. Achieving top performance on each dataset often requires specialized expert knowledge. To address this variability, practitioners often aggregate the predictions of multiple models. However, conventional aggregation strategies typically rely on static combination rules and lack instance-level adaptability. In this work, we propose an in-context ensemble framework for tabular prediction that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform dynamic, instance-specific integration of external model predictions. Without access to raw tabular features or semantic information, our method constructs a context around each test instance using its nearest neighbors and the predictions from a pool of external models. Within this enriched context, we introduce Chain of Tabular Thoughts (CoT$^2$), a prompting strategy that guides LLMs through multi-step, interpretable reasoning, making still further progress toward expert-level decision-making. Experimental results show that our method outperforms well-tuned baselines and standard ensemble techniques across a wide range of tabular datasets.

Representation Learning for Tabular Data: A Comprehensive Survey

Tabular data, structured as rows and columns, is among the most prevalent data types in machine learning classification and regression applications. Models for learning from tabular data have continuously evolved, with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) recently demonstrating promising results through their capability of representation learning. In this survey, we systematically introduce the field of tabular representation learning, covering the background, challenges, and benchmarks, along with the pros and cons of using DNNs. We organize existing methods into three main categories according to their generalization capabilities: specialized, transferable, and general models. Specialized models focus on tasks where training and evaluation occur within the same data distribution. We introduce a hierarchical taxonomy for specialized models based on the key aspects of tabular data -- features, samples, and objectives -- and delve into detailed strategies for obtaining high-quality feature- and sample-level representations. Transferable models are pre-trained on one or more datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on downstream tasks, leveraging knowledge acquired from homogeneous or heterogeneous sources, or even cross-modalities such as vision and language. General models, also known as tabular foundation models, extend this concept further, allowing direct application to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. We group these general models based on the strategies used to adapt across heterogeneous datasets. Additionally, we explore ensemble methods, which integrate the strengths of multiple tabular models. Finally, we discuss representative extensions of tabular learning, including open-environment tabular machine learning, multimodal learning with tabular data, and tabular understanding. More information can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/LAMDA-Tabular/Tabular-Survey.

Model Assembly Learning with Heterogeneous Layer Weight Merging

Model merging acquires general capabilities without extra data or training by combining multiple models' parameters. Previous approaches achieve linear mode connectivity by aligning parameters into the same loss basin using permutation invariance. In this paper, we introduce Model Assembly Learning (MAL), a novel paradigm for model merging that iteratively integrates parameters from diverse models in an open-ended model zoo to enhance the base model's capabilities. Unlike previous works that require identical architectures, MAL allows the merging of heterogeneous architectures and selective parameters across layers. Specifically, the base model can incorporate parameters from different layers of multiple pre-trained models. We systematically investigate the conditions and fundamental settings of heterogeneous parameter merging, addressing all possible mismatches in layer widths between the base and target models. Furthermore, we establish key laws and provide practical guidelines for effectively implementing MAL.

Mitigating Visual Forgetting via Take-along Visual Conditioning for Multi-modal Long CoT Reasoning

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced reasoning capabilities, evolving from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to advanced, product-oriented solutions like OpenAI o1. During our re-implementation of this model, we noticed that in multimodal tasks requiring visual input (e.g., geometry problems), Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) struggle to maintain focus on the visual information, in other words, MLLMs suffer from a gradual decline in attention to visual information as reasoning progresses, causing text-over-relied outputs. To investigate this, we ablate image inputs during long-chain reasoning. Concretely, we truncate the reasoning process midway, then re-complete the reasoning process with the input image removed. We observe only a ~2% accuracy drop on MathVista's test-hard subset, revealing the model's textual outputs dominate the following reasoning process. Motivated by this, we propose Take-along Visual Conditioning (TVC), a strategy that shifts image input to critical reasoning stages and compresses redundant visual tokens via dynamic pruning. This methodology helps the model retain attention to the visual components throughout the reasoning. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on average across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks (+3.4% vs previous sota), demonstrating the effectiveness of TVC in enhancing multimodal reasoning systems.

External Knowledge Injection for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables learning systems to continuously adapt to evolving data streams. With the advancement of pre-training, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising starting point for CIL. However, CLIP makes decisions by matching visual embeddings to class names, overlooking the rich contextual information conveyed through language. For instance, the concept of ``cat'' can be decomposed into features like tail, fur, and face for recognition. Besides, since the model is continually updated, these detailed features are overwritten in CIL, requiring external knowledge for compensation. In this paper, we introduce ExterNal knowledGe INjEction (ENGINE) for CLIP-based CIL. To enhance knowledge transfer from outside the dataset, we propose a dual-branch injection tuning framework that encodes informative knowledge from both visual and textual modalities. The visual branch is enhanced with data augmentation to enrich the visual features, while the textual branch leverages GPT-4 to rewrite discriminative descriptors. In addition to this on-the-fly knowledge injection, we also implement post-tuning knowledge by re-ranking the prediction results during inference. With the injected knowledge, the model can better capture informative features for downstream tasks as data evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ENGINE. Code is available at: https://github.com/RenaissCode/ENGINE

SeqFusion: Sequential Fusion of Pre-Trained Models for Zero-Shot Time-Series Forecasting

Unlike traditional time-series forecasting methods that require extensive in-task data for training, zero-shot forecasting can directly predict future values given a target time series without additional training data. Current zero-shot approaches primarily rely on pre-trained generalized models, with their performance often depending on the variety and relevance of the pre-training data, which can raise privacy concerns. Instead of collecting diverse pre-training data, we introduce SeqFusion in this work, a novel framework that collects and fuses diverse pre-trained models (PTMs) sequentially for zero-shot forecasting. Based on the specific temporal characteristics of the target time series, SeqFusion selects the most suitable PTMs from a batch of pre-collected PTMs, performs sequential predictions, and fuses all the predictions while using minimal data to protect privacy. Each of these PTMs specializes in different temporal patterns and forecasting tasks, allowing SeqFusion to select by measuring distances in a shared representation space of the target time series with each PTM. Experiments demonstrate that SeqFusion achieves competitive accuracy in zero-shot forecasting compared to state-of-the-art methods.

FedDyMem: Efficient Federated Learning with Dynamic Memory and Memory-Reduce for Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised image anomaly detection (UAD) has become a critical process in industrial and medical applications, but it faces growing challenges due to increasing concerns over data privacy. The limited class diversity inherent to one-class classification tasks, combined with distribution biases caused by variations in products across and within clients, poses significant challenges for preserving data privacy with federated UAD. Thus, this article proposes an efficient federated learning method with dynamic memory and memory-reduce for unsupervised image anomaly detection, called FedDyMem. Considering all client data belongs to a single class (i.e., normal sample) in UAD and the distribution of intra-class features demonstrates significant skewness, FedDyMem facilitates knowledge sharing between the client and server through the client's dynamic memory bank instead of model parameters. In the local clients, a memory generator and a metric loss are employed to improve the consistency of the feature distribution for normal samples, leveraging the local model to update the memory bank dynamically. For efficient communication, a memory-reduce method based on weighted averages is proposed to significantly decrease the scale of memory banks. On the server, global memory is constructed and distributed to individual clients through k-means aggregation. Experiments conducted on six industrial and medical datasets, comprising a mixture of six products or health screening types derived from eleven public datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of FedDyMem.

Understanding the Limits of Deep Tabular Methods with Temporal Shift

Deep tabular models have demonstrated remarkable success on i.i.d. data, excelling in a variety of structured data tasks. However, their performance often deteriorates under temporal distribution shifts, where trends and periodic patterns are present in the evolving data distribution over time. In this paper, we explore the underlying reasons for this failure in capturing temporal dependencies. We begin by investigating the training protocol, revealing a key issue in how model selection perform. While existing approaches use temporal ordering for splitting validation set, we show that even a random split can significantly improve model performance. By minimizing the time lag between training data and test time, while reducing the bias in validation, our proposed training protocol significantly improves generalization across various methods. Furthermore, we analyze how temporal data affects deep tabular representations, uncovering that these models often fail to capture crucial periodic and trend information. To address this gap, we introduce a plug-and-play temporal embedding method based on Fourier series expansion to learn and incorporate temporal patterns, offering an adaptive approach to handle temporal shifts. Our experiments demonstrate that this temporal embedding, combined with the improved training protocol, provides a more effective and robust framework for learning from temporal tabular data.

Capability Instruction Tuning: A New Paradigm for Dynamic LLM Routing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like instruction-following abilities, particularly those exceeding 100 billion parameters. The combined capability of some smaller, resource-friendly LLMs can address most of the instructions that larger LLMs excel at. In this work, we explore how to route the best-performing LLM for each instruction to achieve better overall performance. We develop a new paradigm, constructing capability instructions with model capability representation, user instruction, and performance inquiry prompts to assess the performance. To learn from capability instructions, we introduce a new end-to-end framework called Model Selection with Aptitude Test (Model-SAT), which generates positive and negative samples based on what different models perform well or struggle with. Model-SAT uses a model capability encoder that extends its model representation to a lightweight LLM. Our experiments show that Model-SAT understands the performance dimensions of candidate models and provides the probabilities of their capability to handle various instructions. Additionally, during deployment, a new model can quickly infer its aptitude test results across 50 tasks, each with 20 shots. Model-SAT performs state-of-the-art model routing without candidate inference and in real-world new model-released scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Now-Join-Us/CIT-LLM-Routing