Taming Structured Data Foundation Models with AutoML: A Hands-On Guide
Structured data drives enterprise decision-making, yet building predictive pipelines for time-series and tabular modalities requires intensive feature engineering, model selection, and other ''tricks of the trade''. AutoGluon, an open source AutoML system, automates this through multi-layer stack ensembling, providing a unified API that reliably achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across time series and tabular data. Concurrently, Foundation Models for Structured Data (FM4SD) have emerged to push the boundaries of predictive performance, enabling both powerful zero-shot inference and efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art multivariate forecasting for time series, while a rapidly growing ecosystem of tabular foundation models (e.g., TabPFN, Mitra, TabICL) transforms how practitioners execute classification and regression tasks. This system-focused tutorial teaches attendees how to operationalize FM4SDs using AutoML across temporal and tabular modalities, with an additional highlight on the newly released Chronos-2. We guide participants through a technical progression: establishing AutoGluon as the orchestration framework, detailing the internal mechanics of Chronos-2 and various tabular FMs, and unifying them into production-ready pipelines.