Which Tabular Model Should You Actually Use? | David Holzmüller (INRIA)
Which Tabular Model Should You Actually Use? | David Holzmüller (INRIA)  
Podcast: The Information Bottleneck
Published On: Thu Sep 03 2026
Description: DescriptionTabular data is still where most of machine learning actually happens in industry, and the field has changed a lot in the last few years. In this episode we talk with David Holzmüller, a researcher at INRIA and one of the people behind TabArena, TabICL and RealMLP, about what the state of the art looks like right now and how to pick a model for your own data.We cover the shift to TabPFN-style foundation models that learn to learn from whole tables, why TabArena was built and what earlier benchmarks got wrong, what Google's new TabFM means for the leaderboard, and when gradient boosted trees are still the right tool. David explains why LLMs struggle with tables, shares an early result comparing Claude Opus against TabICL on tiny datasets, and walks through how to embed text columns for tabular models. We also get into time series vs tabular data, the open research problems he thinks matter most, and why classical ML libraries are so bad out of the box.Links:TabArena: https://tabarena.aiTopicsTabular foundation models and in-context learning on tablesTabArena and Beyond Arena: building a benchmark that stays honestTabFM, TabPFN, TabICL and the tradeoffs between themWhen boosted trees and MLPs still win (large data, CPU, fast inference)Why LLMs are inefficient on tabular data and where they might helpEmbedding text columns with language modelsExplainability, calibration and class imbalanceTime series vs tabular dataOpen problems: invariances, synthetic data, uncertainty, scaling downWhere the field is heading in the next five yearsChapters0:00 Intro0:31 What changed in tabular ML: TabPFN-style foundation models2:22 Which model to try first? TabArena and how it was built5:14 What older benchmarks got wrong, and Beyond Arena8:45 GPU AutoML vs foundation models10:40 Reading the leaderboard: TabFM, TabPFN, TabICL and the tradeoffs12:47 Calibration, class imbalance and small vs large data19:45 Explainability for black-box tabular models21:34 Why LLMs are bad at tabular data25:39 Claude Opus 4.6 vs TabICL on tiny datasets27:51 New classifiers, five-year outlook, real vs synthetic pretraining33:13 Embedding text columns for tabular foundation models36:13 Time series vs tabular data39:59 When gradient boosted trees still win, and feature engineering45:31 Open research problems and where the field is heading52:54 Better MLPs and why classical defaults are bad out of the boxMusic"Kid Kodi" - Blue Dot Sessions - via Free Music Archive - CC BY-NC 4.0