The success of self-supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing has motivated pretraining methods on tabular data. However, most existing tabular self-supervised learning models fail to leverage information across multiple data tables and cannot generalize to new tables. In this work, we introduce XTab, a framework for cross-table pretraining of tabular transformers on datasets from various domains. We address the challenge of inconsistent column types and quantities among tables by utilizing independent featurizers and using federated learning to pretrain the shared component. Tested on 84 tabular prediction tasks from the OpenML-AutoML Benchmark (AMLB), we show that (1) XTab consistently boosts the generalizability, learning speed, and performance of multiple tabular transformers, (2) by pretraining FT-Transformer via XTab, we achieve superior performance than other state-of-the-art tabular deep learning models on various tasks such as regression, binary, and multiclass classification.

本研究提出了一个名为XTab的跨表格预训练框架，使用自监督学习算法来提高多种数据集上的表格变换器的泛化性、学习速度和性能，并通过联邦学习解决了跨表不一致的挑战。

XTab：跨表预训练技术用于表格Transformer模型