Harpoon: Generalised Manifold Guidance for Conditional Tabular Diffusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shankar, Aditya, Wang, Yuandou, Hai, Rihan, Chen, Lydia Y.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Shankar, Aditya
Wang, Yuandou
Hai, Rihan
Chen, Lydia Y.
author_facet Shankar, Aditya
Wang, Yuandou
Hai, Rihan
Chen, Lydia Y.
contents Generating tabular data under conditions is critical to applications requiring precise control over the generative process. Existing methods rely on training-time strategies that do not generalise to unseen constraints during inference, and struggle to handle conditional tasks beyond tabular imputation. While manifold theory offers a principled way to guide generation, current formulations are tied to specific inference-time objectives and are limited to continuous domains. We extend manifold theory to tabular data and expand its scope to handle diverse inference-time objectives. On this foundation, we introduce HARPOON, a tabular diffusion method that guides unconstrained samples along the manifold geometry to satisfy diverse tabular conditions at inference. We validate our theoretical contributions empirically on tasks such as imputation and enforcing inequality constraints, demonstrating HARPOON'S strong performance across diverse datasets and the practical benefits of manifold-aware guidance for tabular data. Code URL: https://github.com/adis98/Harpoon
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Harpoon: Generalised Manifold Guidance for Conditional Tabular Diffusion
Shankar, Aditya
Wang, Yuandou
Hai, Rihan
Chen, Lydia Y.
Machine Learning
Generating tabular data under conditions is critical to applications requiring precise control over the generative process. Existing methods rely on training-time strategies that do not generalise to unseen constraints during inference, and struggle to handle conditional tasks beyond tabular imputation. While manifold theory offers a principled way to guide generation, current formulations are tied to specific inference-time objectives and are limited to continuous domains. We extend manifold theory to tabular data and expand its scope to handle diverse inference-time objectives. On this foundation, we introduce HARPOON, a tabular diffusion method that guides unconstrained samples along the manifold geometry to satisfy diverse tabular conditions at inference. We validate our theoretical contributions empirically on tasks such as imputation and enforcing inequality constraints, demonstrating HARPOON'S strong performance across diverse datasets and the practical benefits of manifold-aware guidance for tabular data. Code URL: https://github.com/adis98/Harpoon
title Harpoon: Generalised Manifold Guidance for Conditional Tabular Diffusion
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07875