LAB-Tab is proposed, an LLM-augmented Bayesian network (BN) adaptation framework for source-aware few-shot tabular generation that achieves the best performance at the 10% target-data budget, leads four of the six individual scenarios, and reduces the macro Overall score by 33.8% relative to the strongest baseline.
Abstract
Tabular data generation supports analysis and decision-making when target-domain data are scarce, yet collecting complete target samples is often costly. A practical but underexplored setting provides only a few target records together with richer source data from a related domain. Existing few-shot tabular generators often either fit sparse target statistics directly, which can overfit incidental patterns, or reuse source-domain generators, which may preserve dependencies that no longer hold in the target domain. To address this problem, we propose LAB-Tab, an LLM-augmented Bayesian network (BN) adaptation framework for source-aware few-shot tabular generation. LAB-Tab first fits a BN from source data and then uses an LLM to propose plausible target-domain BN edges that are absent from the source BN graph. This step converts semantic and weak statistical evidence into explicit structural hypotheses, thereby expanding the editable edge space beyond the source-fitted graph. Because the proposed edges may be noisy and interact with existing dependencies, a PPO policy calibrates edges in the augmented BN through edge-level actions, including keep, weaken, strengthen, flip, and deactivate. The PPO policy is trained with a reward that combines distributional alignment, downstream utility, and preservation of target-relevant dependencies. The adapted BN is then sampled to synthesize target-domain tables. Across six source--target distribution-shift scenarios built from three US Census (ACS) prediction tasks, LAB-Tab achieves the best performance at the 10% target-data budget, leads four of the six individual scenarios, and reduces the macro Overall score by 33.8% relative to the strongest baseline. It also obtains the best macro JSD, WAPE, and UtilityGap while maintaining competitive feature--label preservation.
Cross-domain few-shot learning focuses on transferring knowledge from a source domain to an unseen target domain, but traditional methods often rely on simple additive perturbations, which limit their effectiveness in handling domain shifts. To address this limitation, we propose an innovative meta-learning framework augmented by uncertainty generation. Our approach introduces a novel gradient-based uncertainty generation method that treats feature statistics, such as mean and variance, as probabilistic representations assuming an unknown distribution. These statistics are manipulated through task gradients, which allow the model to capture the range of possible variations, thereby generating uncertainty feature distributions that simulate domain biases. Additionally, we incorporate a causal invariant information (CII) module to extract causal features and improve the consistency of task gradients across domains. This module ensures that the task gradients reflect domain-invariant features, reducing the impact of domain-specific noise and providing a more reliable framework for constructing uncertainty boundaries. Together, these components enable the development of an asymptotic meta-learning optimization algorithm that learns generalized knowledge from uncertainty features while optimizing the uncertainty distribution boundaries. Experimental results across nine datasets demonstrate that our method improves the current state-of-the-art by an average of 3.11%, with key innovations in using probabilistic feature statistics, gradient-based uncertainty modeling, and causal feature extraction that enhance cross-domain knowledge transfer more effectively than existing techniques.
Synthetic tabular data is increasingly used to support data sharing and machine learning development, where access to real data is restricted or sensitive. However, existing tabular data generators often require dataset-specific training or fine-tuning, data preprocessing, and extensive hyperparameter tuning to achieve plausible results. In addition, existing models may still struggle with mixed data types, modeling complex feature relationships, and pose a privacy risk for information leakage. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their expanding capabilities across many domains, we investigate whether few-shot LLMs can be used in a training-free setting as tabular data generators. We propose FewShotTabLLM, a few-shot, training-free generation framework for tabular data that leverages schema-enriched context, representative sampling, and dataset profiling. We evaluate our approach across five widely used tabular benchmark datasets and compare it against strong training-based baselines from different model families (CTGAN, TVAE, TabDDPM, BeGReaT). A three-axis evaluation protocol has been used that covers representativeness, realism, and privacy. Across all evaluations, FewShotTabLLM outperforms baselines and surpasses them on many datasets, achieving realism, boundary adherence, and privacy preservation across all experiments. Overall, the results suggest that training-free fewshot LLM synthesis can serve as an alternative to existing models and a prominent research direction for improving dependency preservation and privacy-aware generation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/FewShotTabLLM
Hadi Koubeissy, Michel El Khoury, Marc Kamradt et al.· Annual International Compute...· 0 citations
We introduce RecPFN, a prior-fitted network that brings in-context learning to sequential recommendation. RecPFN is pretrained entirely on synthetic clickstream environments sampled from a broad structural causal prior, enabling it to amortize Bayesian-style inference from a small support set. At inference, a lightweight decoder-only transformer conditions on a handful of domain sequences and produces next-item predictions for queries in a single forward pass, without any weight updates. Across eight public benchmarks, RecPFN achives state-of-the-art zero-shot performance while remaining strongly competitive with supervised methods in low-compute and low-data regimes. It is deployment-efficient and robust to domain shift, outperforming strong zero-shot baselines that rely on large real-interaction corpora. RecPFN provides a practical path toward generalizable, data-efficient recommenders and opens avenues for richer priors, longer-context ICL, and multimodal extensions. Code for training and evaluation will be made publicly available by the conference date.
En Zhi Tan, Jia Xiang Lim, Bryan Lijie Chew et al.· Annual International ACM SIG...· 0 citations
TabNSM provides an effective and scalable approach to deep tabular regression, and demonstrates that selective interaction modeling, structured regression supervision, and difficulty-aware sampling provide an effective and scalable approach to deep tabular regression.
Results support IAIML as a compact, interaction-aware framework appropriate for settings where bounded explanation size and controlled treatment of feature interactions are design requirements.