Abstract:Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity. However, recent approaches with either cell-based architectures or retrieval have sacrificed efficiency for raw performance, restricting their utility in situations where compute is limited or inference speed is crucial. We adopt an alternate approach, sticking with row-based attention while incorporating long context pre-training to eliminate the need for retrieval. By combining this with architectural improvements and SSL pre-training on a newly-sourced, larger corpus of real data results, we present TabDPT-Turbo, a model that provides comparable default performance to TabDPT v1.1 on TabArena-Lite, CC18, and CTR23, at orders of magnitude faster. In our experiments, TabDPT-Turbo is the fastest model overall among leading foundation models. We have released the new model as TabDPT v1.2 at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/TabDPT-inference.
Abstract:Responsible AI (RAI) efforts increasingly emphasize the importance of addressing potential harms early in the AI development lifecycle through social-technical lenses. However, in cross-functional industry teams, this work is often stalled by a persistent knowledge handoff challenge: the difficulty of transferring high-level, early-stage technical design rationales from technical experts to non-technical or user-facing roles for ethical evaluation and harm identification. Through literature review and a co-design study with 8 practitioners, we unpack how this challenge manifests -- technical design choices are rarely handed off in ways that support meaningful engagement by non-technical roles; collaborative workflows lack shared, visual structures to support mutual understanding; and non-technical practitioners are left without scaffolds for systematic harm evaluation. Existing tools like JIRA or Google Docs, while useful for product tracking, are ill-suited for supporting joint harm identification across roles, often requiring significant extra effort to align understanding. To address this, we developed AI LEGO, a web-based prototype that supports cross-functional AI practitioners in effectively facilitating knowledge handoff and identifying harmful design choices in the early design stages. Technical roles use interactive blocks to draft development plans, while non-technical roles engage with those blocks through stage-specific checklists and LLM-driven persona simulations to surface potential harms. In a study with 18 cross-functional practitioners, AI LEGO increased the volume and likelihood of harms identified compared to baseline worksheets. Participants found that its modular structure and persona prompts made harm identification more accessible, fostering clearer and more collaborative RAI practices in early design.