Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gorishniy, Yury, Rubachev, Ivan, Feoktistov, Dmitrii, Babenko, Artem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15297
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910140066693120
author Gorishniy, Yury
Rubachev, Ivan
Feoktistov, Dmitrii
Babenko, Artem
author_facet Gorishniy, Yury
Rubachev, Ivan
Feoktistov, Dmitrii
Babenko, Artem
contents MLP is a heavily used backbone in modern deep learning (DL) architectures for supervised learning on tabular data, and AdamW is the go-to optimizer used to train tabular DL models. Unlike architecture design, however, the choice of optimizer for tabular DL has not been examined systematically, despite new optimizers showing promise in other domains. To fill this gap, we benchmark 15 optimizers on 17 tabular datasets for training MLP-based models in the standard supervised learning setting under a shared experiment protocol. Our main finding is that the Muon optimizer consistently outperforms AdamW, and thus should be considered a strong and practical choice for practitioners and researchers, if the associated training efficiency overhead is affordable. Additionally, we find exponential moving average of model weights to be a simple yet effective technique that improves AdamW on vanilla MLPs, though its effect is less consistent across model variants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_15297
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Optimizers for MLPs in Tabular Deep Learning
Gorishniy, Yury
Rubachev, Ivan
Feoktistov, Dmitrii
Babenko, Artem
Machine Learning
MLP is a heavily used backbone in modern deep learning (DL) architectures for supervised learning on tabular data, and AdamW is the go-to optimizer used to train tabular DL models. Unlike architecture design, however, the choice of optimizer for tabular DL has not been examined systematically, despite new optimizers showing promise in other domains. To fill this gap, we benchmark 15 optimizers on 17 tabular datasets for training MLP-based models in the standard supervised learning setting under a shared experiment protocol. Our main finding is that the Muon optimizer consistently outperforms AdamW, and thus should be considered a strong and practical choice for practitioners and researchers, if the associated training efficiency overhead is affordable. Additionally, we find exponential moving average of model weights to be a simple yet effective technique that improves AdamW on vanilla MLPs, though its effect is less consistent across model variants.
title Benchmarking Optimizers for MLPs in Tabular Deep Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15297