TabICLv2: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model

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Main Authors: Qu, Jingang, Holzmüller, David, Varoquaux, Gaël, Morvan, Marine Le
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qu, Jingang
Holzmüller, David
Varoquaux, Gaël
Morvan, Marine Le
author_facet Qu, Jingang
Holzmüller, David
Varoquaux, Gaël
Morvan, Marine Le
contents Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFNv2 and TabICL, have recently dethroned gradient-boosted trees at the top of predictive benchmarks, demonstrating the value of in-context learning for tabular data. We introduce TabICLv2, a new state-of-the-art foundation model for regression and classification built on three pillars: (1) a novel synthetic data generation engine designed for high pretraining diversity; (2) various architectural innovations, including a new scalable softmax in attention improving generalization to larger datasets without prohibitive long-sequence pretraining; and (3) optimized pretraining protocols, notably replacing AdamW with the Muon optimizer. On the TabArena and TALENT benchmarks, TabICLv2 without any tuning surpasses the performance of the current state of the art, RealTabPFN-2.5 (hyperparameter-tuned, ensembled, and fine-tuned on real data). With only moderate pretraining compute, TabICLv2 generalizes effectively to million-scale datasets under 50GB GPU memory while being markedly faster than RealTabPFN-2.5. We provide extensive ablation studies to quantify these contributions and commit to open research by first releasing inference code and model weights at https://github.com/soda-inria/tabicl, with synthetic data engine and pretraining code to follow.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TabICLv2: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model
Qu, Jingang
Holzmüller, David
Varoquaux, Gaël
Morvan, Marine Le
Machine Learning
Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFNv2 and TabICL, have recently dethroned gradient-boosted trees at the top of predictive benchmarks, demonstrating the value of in-context learning for tabular data. We introduce TabICLv2, a new state-of-the-art foundation model for regression and classification built on three pillars: (1) a novel synthetic data generation engine designed for high pretraining diversity; (2) various architectural innovations, including a new scalable softmax in attention improving generalization to larger datasets without prohibitive long-sequence pretraining; and (3) optimized pretraining protocols, notably replacing AdamW with the Muon optimizer. On the TabArena and TALENT benchmarks, TabICLv2 without any tuning surpasses the performance of the current state of the art, RealTabPFN-2.5 (hyperparameter-tuned, ensembled, and fine-tuned on real data). With only moderate pretraining compute, TabICLv2 generalizes effectively to million-scale datasets under 50GB GPU memory while being markedly faster than RealTabPFN-2.5. We provide extensive ablation studies to quantify these contributions and commit to open research by first releasing inference code and model weights at https://github.com/soda-inria/tabicl, with synthetic data engine and pretraining code to follow.
title TabICLv2: A better, faster, scalable, and open tabular foundation model
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11139