uLEAD-TabPFN: Uncertainty-aware Dependency-based Anomaly Detection with TabPFN

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Sha, Liu, Jixue, Peters, Stefan, Le, Thuc Duy, Xie, Craig, Liu, Lin, Li, Jiuyong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Lu, Sha
Liu, Jixue
Peters, Stefan
Le, Thuc Duy
Xie, Craig
Liu, Lin
Li, Jiuyong
author_facet Lu, Sha
Liu, Jixue
Peters, Stefan
Le, Thuc Duy
Xie, Craig
Liu, Lin
Li, Jiuyong
contents Anomaly detection in tabular data is challenging due to high dimensionality, complex feature dependencies, and heterogeneous noise. Many existing methods rely on proximity-based cues and may miss anomalies caused by violations of complex feature dependencies. Dependency-based anomaly detection provides a principled alternative by identifying anomalies as violations of dependencies among features. However, existing methods often struggle to model such dependencies robustly and to scale to high-dimensional data with complex dependency structures. To address these challenges, we propose uLEAD-TabPFN, a dependency-based anomaly detection framework built on Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs). uLEAD-TabPFN identifies anomalies as violations of conditional dependencies in a learned latent space, leveraging frozen PFNs for dependency estimation. Combined with uncertainty-aware scoring, the proposed framework enables robust and scalable anomaly detection. Experiments on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show that uLEAD-TabPFN achieves particularly strong performance in medium- and high-dimensional settings, where it attains the top average rank. On high-dimensional datasets, uLEAD-TabPFN improves the average ROC-AUC by nearly 20\% over the average baseline and by approximately 2.8\% over the best-performing baseline, while maintaining overall superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis shows that uLEAD-TabPFN provides complementary anomaly detection capability, achieving strong performance on datasets where many existing methods struggle.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle uLEAD-TabPFN: Uncertainty-aware Dependency-based Anomaly Detection with TabPFN
Lu, Sha
Liu, Jixue
Peters, Stefan
Le, Thuc Duy
Xie, Craig
Liu, Lin
Li, Jiuyong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Anomaly detection in tabular data is challenging due to high dimensionality, complex feature dependencies, and heterogeneous noise. Many existing methods rely on proximity-based cues and may miss anomalies caused by violations of complex feature dependencies. Dependency-based anomaly detection provides a principled alternative by identifying anomalies as violations of dependencies among features. However, existing methods often struggle to model such dependencies robustly and to scale to high-dimensional data with complex dependency structures. To address these challenges, we propose uLEAD-TabPFN, a dependency-based anomaly detection framework built on Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs). uLEAD-TabPFN identifies anomalies as violations of conditional dependencies in a learned latent space, leveraging frozen PFNs for dependency estimation. Combined with uncertainty-aware scoring, the proposed framework enables robust and scalable anomaly detection. Experiments on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show that uLEAD-TabPFN achieves particularly strong performance in medium- and high-dimensional settings, where it attains the top average rank. On high-dimensional datasets, uLEAD-TabPFN improves the average ROC-AUC by nearly 20\% over the average baseline and by approximately 2.8\% over the best-performing baseline, while maintaining overall superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis shows that uLEAD-TabPFN provides complementary anomaly detection capability, achieving strong performance on datasets where many existing methods struggle.
title uLEAD-TabPFN: Uncertainty-aware Dependency-based Anomaly Detection with TabPFN
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20255