TabPFN beyond Tabular Data: Calibration and Accuracy on Multimodal Embeddings

Abstract

Few-shot multimodal classification commonly attaches a lightweight head, such as $k$-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, or a linear SVM, to a frozen pretrained encoder. Although computationally efficient, these heads can produce poorly calibrated confidence scores. We ask whether TabPFN can provide reliable confidence estimates on multimodal embeddings without sacrificing predictive accuracy, and under what conditions. We systematically evaluate TabPFN as a zero-gradient head for frozen image, text, and audio encoders. Across 22{,}820 evaluation episodes spanning 14 datasets, 11 encoders, and three modalities, TabPFN achieves the best mean rank among nine classification heads on both negative log-likelihood (NLL) and expected calibration error (ECE). At a representative setting, it reduces NLL by 48--62\% and ECE by 2.1--5.3$\times$ relative to the average of eight baselines while matching or exceeding their average accuracy. This calibration benefit transfers broadly, whereas the accuracy advantage is conditional: it concentrates at moderate-to-high shot counts and low-to-moderate feature dimensions ($k \ge 50$, $d \le 32$), and diminishes when labeled data are scarce, feature dimensions are high, or competing methods approach ceiling accuracy. After backbone adaptation, replacing the trained linear head with TabPFN improves calibration while preserving competitive accuracy, showing that representation adaptation and reliable head choice are complementary. Together, these results identify when TabPFN can serve as a training-free head for calibration-sensitive multimodal classification. To support transparency and reproducibility, we publicly release the source code, experiment configurations, and evaluation scripts in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/Jingxiang-Zhang/tabpfn-multimodal-embeddings.