arXiv subjects

Artem Babenko

Publications and source records attributed to Artem Babenko.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TabPack: Efficient Hyperparameter Ensembles for Tabular Deep Learning

In deep learning for tabular data, efficient ensembles of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently emerged as effective and practical architectures. Existing methods of this kind use the same hyperparameters for all underlying MLPs, which requires hyperparameter tuning for achieving the best performance. In this work, we introduce TabPack, an efficient MLP ensemble with strong out-of-the-box performance and reduced reliance on traditional tuning. In a single run, TabPack samples and trains many MLPs with different hyperparameters efficiently in parallel and selects ensemble members on the fly during training. Thus, TabPack only requires specifying ranges from which to sample MLP hyperparameter rather than exact hyperparameter values, which naturally demands less precision for good performance. In experiments on medium-to-large public datasets, TabPack with default settings performs on par with extensively tuned prior methods, thus substantially reducing effort and compute resources needed to achieve competitive results on tabular tasks. Notably, running the default TabPack configuration on a modern MacBook took less time than tuning some baselines on an industry-grade GPU.

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arXiv2026

Registers Matter for Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are known to exhibit high-norm patch-token outliers that degrade feature map quality, a problem effectively mitigated by register tokens. As diffusion models increasingly adopt transformer architectures and move toward pixel-space training, they become closer in form to ViTs, raising the question of whether register tokens are also useful for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In this work, we show that DiTs differ from ViTs in a key respect: they do not exhibit patch-token outliers but still benefit from registers. Interestingly, registers are more effective in pixel-space DiTs than in latent-space DiTs. By analyzing intermediate representations, we find that register tokens produce cleaner feature maps at high noise levels, which may contribute to their effectiveness in pixel-space generation. We further observe that recent pixel-space DiT architectures implicitly incorporate register-like mechanisms, which may partially account for their strong empirical performance. Motivated by these observations, we propose Register Guidance, a technique that amplifies the contribution of register tokens responsible for improving visual structure and coherence.

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arXiv2026

Benchmarking Optimizers for MLPs in Tabular Deep 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.

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arXiv2026

Revisiting Autoregressive Models for Generative Image Classification

Class-conditional generative models have emerged as accurate and robust classifiers, with diffusion models demonstrating clear advantages over other visual generative paradigms, including autoregressive (AR) models. In this work, we revisit visual AR-based generative classifiers and identify an important limitation of prior approaches: their reliance on a fixed token order, which imposes a restrictive inductive bias for image understanding. We observe that single-order predictions rely more on partial discriminative cues, while averaging over multiple token orders provides a more comprehensive signal. Based on this insight, we leverage recent any-order AR models to estimate order-marginalized predictions, unlocking the high classification potential of AR models. Our approach consistently outperforms diffusion-based classifiers across diverse image classification benchmarks, while being up to 25x more efficient. Compared to state-of-the-art self-supervised discriminative models, our method delivers competitive classification performance - a notable achievement for generative classifiers.

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arXiv2025

Talking Trees: Reasoning-Assisted Induction of Decision Trees for Tabular Data

Tabular foundation models are becoming increasingly popular for low-resource tabular problems. These models make up for small training datasets by pretraining on large volumes of synthetic data. The prior knowledge obtained via pretraining provides the exceptional performance, but the resulting model becomes a black box that is difficult to interpret and costly for inference. In this work, we explore an alternative strategy: using reasoning-capable LLMs to induce decision trees for small tabular datasets in an agentic setup. We design a minimal set of tools for constructing, analyzing, and manipulating decision trees. Equipped with these tools, the LLM combines its prior knowledge with learning from data to produce a lightweight decision tree that outperforms CART and recent non-greedy tree learners and remains competitive with tree ensembles on low-resource tabular problems. While a single agentic decision tree is competitive with state-of-the-art black box models, it also comes with a human-readable reasoning trace that can be checked for biases and data leaks. Furthermore, the reasoning-based LLM's creation process allows for additional human input to be incorporated into the tree without it being captured in data.

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arXiv2025

GraphPFN: A Prior-Data Fitted Graph Foundation Model

Graph foundation models face several fundamental challenges including transferability across diverse domains and data scarcity, which calls into question the very feasibility of creating such models. However, despite similar challenges, the tabular domain has recently witnessed the emergence of the first successful foundation models such as TabPFN. These models are based on the prior-data fitted networks (PFN) framework, in which models are pretrained on carefully designed synthetic datasets to make predictions in an in-context learning setting. Recently, G2T-FM, a framework that converts graph node-level tasks into tabular tasks, has made the first step towards adopting PFNs for graphs, yet it is limited to hand-crafted features and was never pretrained on graph data. In this work, we make the next step by proposing GraphPFN, a PFN-based model designed and pretrained specifically for graph node-level tasks. Following the PFN framework, we first design a prior distribution of synthetic attributed graphs by using a novel combination of multi-level stochastic block models and a preferential attachment process for structure generation and graph-aware structured causal models for attribute generation. Then, we augment the tabular foundation model LimiX with attention-based graph neighborhood aggregation layers and train it on millions of synthetic graphs sampled from our prior. On diverse real-world graph datasets with node-level tasks, GraphPFN achieves state-of-the-art results in both in-context learning and finetuning regimes, outperforming G2T-FM, prior GFMs, and task-specific GNNs trained from scratch. More broadly, GraphPFN shows the potential of PFN-based models for building graph foundation models.

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arXiv2025

Unveiling the Role of Data Uncertainty in Tabular Deep Learning

Recent advancements in tabular deep learning have demonstrated exceptional practical performance, yet the field often lacks a clear understanding of why these techniques actually succeed. To address this gap, our paper highlights the importance of the concept of data uncertainty for explaining the effectiveness of the recent tabular DL methods. In particular, we reveal that the success of many beneficial design choices in tabular DL, such as numerical feature embeddings, retrieval-augmented models and advanced ensembling strategies, can be largely attributed to their implicit mechanisms for managing high data uncertainty. By dissecting these mechanisms, we provide a unifying understanding of the recent performance improvements. Furthermore, the insights derived from this data-uncertainty perspective directly allowed us to develop more effective numerical feature embeddings as an immediate practical outcome of our analysis. Overall, our work paves the way to foundational understanding of the benefits introduced by modern tabular methods that results in the concrete advancements of existing techniques and outlines future research directions for tabular DL.

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arXiv2025

Turning Tabular Foundation Models into Graph Foundation Models

While foundation models have revolutionized fields such as natural language processing and computer vision, their potential in graph machine learning remains largely unexplored. One of the key challenges in designing graph foundation models (GFMs) is handling diverse node features that can vary across different graph datasets. While many works on GFMs have focused exclusively on text-attributed graphs, the problem of handling arbitrary features of other types in GFMs has not been fully addressed. However, this problem is not unique to the graph domain, as it also arises in the field of machine learning for tabular data. In this work, motivated by the recent success of tabular foundation models (TFMs) like TabPFNv2 and LimiX, we propose G2T-FM, a simple framework that allows tabular foundation models to be applied to graph node-level tasks. Specifically, G2T-FM augments the original node features with neighborhood feature aggregation, adds structural embeddings, and then applies a TFM to the constructed node representations. Even in the in-context learning setting, our model achieves strong results when combined with a strong TFM, outperforming both prior GFMs and well-tuned GNNs trained from scratch. Moreover, after finetuning, G2T-FM consistently surpasses well-tuned GNN baselines, often by a significant margin. In summary, our paper reveals the potential of a previously overlooked direction: utilizing tabular foundation models for graph machine learning tasks.

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arXiv2025

On Finetuning Tabular Foundation Models

Foundation models are an emerging research direction in tabular deep learning. Notably, TabPFNv2 recently claimed superior performance over traditional GBDT-based methods on small-scale datasets using an in-context learning paradigm, which does not adapt model parameters to target datasets. However, the optimal finetuning approach for adapting tabular foundational models, and how this adaptation reshapes their internal mechanisms, remains underexplored. While prior works studied finetuning for earlier foundational models, inconsistent findings and TabPFNv2's unique architecture necessitate fresh investigation. To address these questions, we first systematically evaluate various finetuning strategies on diverse datasets. Our findings establish full finetuning as the most practical solution for TabPFNv2 in terms of time-efficiency and effectiveness. We then investigate how finetuning alters TabPFNv2's inner mechanisms, drawing an analogy to retrieval-augmented models. We reveal that the success of finetuning stems from the fact that after gradient-based adaptation, the dot products of the query-representations of test objects and the key-representations of in-context training objects more accurately reflect their target similarity. This improved similarity allows finetuned TabPFNv2 to better approximate target dependency by appropriately weighting relevant in-context samples, improving the retrieval-based prediction logic. From the practical perspective, we managed to finetune TabPFNv2 on datasets with up to 50K objects, observing performance improvements on almost all tasks. More precisely, on academic datasets with I.I.D. splits, finetuning allows TabPFNv2 to achieve state-of-the-art results, while on datasets with gradual temporal shifts and rich feature sets, TabPFNv2 is less stable and prior methods remain better.

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arXiv2025

Scale-wise Distillation of Diffusion Models

Recent diffusion distillation methods have achieved remarkable progress, enabling high-quality ${\sim}4$-step sampling for large-scale text-conditional image and video diffusion models. However, further reducing the number of sampling steps becomes more and more challenging, suggesting that efficiency gains may be better mined along other model axes. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce SwD, a scale-wise diffusion distillation framework that equips few-step models with progressive generation, avoiding redundant computations at intermediate diffusion timesteps. Beyond efficiency, SwD enriches the family of distribution matching distillation approaches by introducing a simple patch-level distillation objective based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). This objective significantly improves the convergence of existing distillation methods and performs surprisingly well in isolation, offering a competitive baseline for diffusion distillation. Applied to state-of-the-art text-to-image/video diffusion models, SwD approaches the sampling speed of two full-resolution steps and largely outperforms alternatives under the same compute budget, as evidenced by automatic metrics and human preference studies. Project page: https://yandex-research.github.io/swd

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arXiv2024

TabM: Advancing Tabular Deep Learning with Parameter-Efficient Ensembling

Deep learning architectures for supervised learning on tabular data range from simple multilayer perceptrons (MLP) to sophisticated Transformers and retrieval-augmented methods. This study highlights a major, yet so far overlooked opportunity for designing substantially better MLP-based tabular architectures. Namely, our new model TabM relies on efficient ensembling, where one TabM efficiently imitates an ensemble of MLPs and produces multiple predictions per object. Compared to a traditional deep ensemble, in TabM, the underlying implicit MLPs are trained simultaneously, and (by default) share most of their parameters, which results in significantly better performance and efficiency. Using TabM as a new baseline, we perform a large-scale evaluation of tabular DL architectures on public benchmarks in terms of both task performance and efficiency, which renders the landscape of tabular DL in a new light. Generally, we show that MLPs, including TabM, form a line of stronger and more practical models compared to attention- and retrieval-based architectures. In particular, we find that TabM demonstrates the best performance among tabular DL models. Then, we conduct an empirical analysis on the ensemble-like nature of TabM. We observe that the multiple predictions of TabM are weak individually, but powerful collectively. Overall, our work brings an impactful technique to tabular DL and advances the performance-efficiency trade-off with TabM -- a simple and powerful baseline for researchers and practitioners.

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arXiv2024

TabReD: Analyzing Pitfalls and Filling the Gaps in Tabular Deep Learning Benchmarks

Advances in machine learning research drive progress in real-world applications. To ensure this progress, it is important to understand the potential pitfalls on the way from a novel method's success on academic benchmarks to its practical deployment. In this work, we analyze existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of tabular data in typical industrial applications that are underrepresented in the datasets usually used for evaluation in the literature. First, in real-world deployment scenarios, distribution of data often changes over time. To account for this distribution drift, time-based train/test splits should be used in evaluation. However, popular tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. This can have an impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features compared to academic datasets. In this work, we aim to understand how recent research advances in tabular deep learning transfer to these underrepresented conditions. To this end, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets. We reassess a large number of tabular ML models and techniques on TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits, which are common in current benchmarks. Furthermore, simple MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results on the TabReD datasets, while other methods are less effective in the new setting.

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arXiv2024

Invertible Consistency Distillation for Text-Guided Image Editing in Around 7 Steps

Diffusion distillation represents a highly promising direction for achieving faithful text-to-image generation in a few sampling steps. However, despite recent successes, existing distilled models still do not provide the full spectrum of diffusion abilities, such as real image inversion, which enables many precise image manipulation methods. This work aims to enrich distilled text-to-image diffusion models with the ability to effectively encode real images into their latent space. To this end, we introduce invertible Consistency Distillation (iCD), a generalized consistency distillation framework that facilitates both high-quality image synthesis and accurate image encoding in only 3-4 inference steps. Though the inversion problem for text-to-image diffusion models gets exacerbated by high classifier-free guidance scales, we notice that dynamic guidance significantly reduces reconstruction errors without noticeable degradation in generation performance. As a result, we demonstrate that iCD equipped with dynamic guidance may serve as a highly effective tool for zero-shot text-guided image editing, competing with more expensive state-of-the-art alternatives.

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arXiv2024

YaART: Yet Another ART Rendering Technology

In the rapidly progressing field of generative models, the development of efficient and high-fidelity text-to-image diffusion systems represents a significant frontier. This study introduces YaART, a novel production-grade text-to-image cascaded diffusion model aligned to human preferences using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). During the development of YaART, we especially focus on the choices of the model and training dataset sizes, the aspects that were not systematically investigated for text-to-image cascaded diffusion models before. In particular, we comprehensively analyze how these choices affect both the efficiency of the training process and the quality of the generated images, which are highly important in practice. Furthermore, we demonstrate that models trained on smaller datasets of higher-quality images can successfully compete with those trained on larger datasets, establishing a more efficient scenario of diffusion models training. From the quality perspective, YaART is consistently preferred by users over many existing state-of-the-art models.

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arXiv2024

QUASAR: QUality and Aesthetics Scoring with Advanced Representations

This paper introduces a new data-driven, non-parametric method for image quality and aesthetics assessment, surpassing existing approaches and requiring no prompt engineering or fine-tuning. We eliminate the need for expressive textual embeddings by proposing efficient image anchors in the data. Through extensive evaluations of 7 state-of-the-art self-supervised models, our method demonstrates superior performance and robustness across various datasets and benchmarks. Notably, it achieves high agreement with human assessments even with limited data and shows high robustness to the nature of data and their pre-processing pipeline. Our contributions offer a streamlined solution for assessment of images while providing insights into the perception of visual information.

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arXiv2024

Extreme Compression of Large Language Models via Additive Quantization

The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has led to a race towards performant quantization techniques which can enable their execution on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of "extreme" LLM compression-defined as targeting extremely low bit counts, such as 2 to 3 bits per parameter-from the point of view of classic methods in Multi-Codebook Quantization (MCQ). Our algorithm, called AQLM, generalizes the classic Additive Quantization (AQ) approach for information retrieval to advance the state-of-the-art in LLM compression, via two innovations: 1) learned additive quantization of weight matrices in input-adaptive fashion, and 2) joint optimization of codebook parameters across each transformer blocks. Broadly, AQLM is the first scheme that is Pareto optimal in terms of accuracy-vs-model-size when compressing to less than 3 bits per parameter, and significantly improves upon all known schemes in the extreme compression (2bit) regime. In addition, AQLM is practical: we provide fast GPU and CPU implementations of AQLM for token generation, which enable us to match or outperform optimized FP16 implementations for speed, while executing in a much smaller memory footprint.

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arXiv2023

Your Student is Better Than Expected: Adaptive Teacher-Student Collaboration for Text-Conditional Diffusion Models

Knowledge distillation methods have recently shown to be a promising direction to speedup the synthesis of large-scale diffusion models by requiring only a few inference steps. While several powerful distillation methods were recently proposed, the overall quality of student samples is typically lower compared to the teacher ones, which hinders their practical usage. In this work, we investigate the relative quality of samples produced by the teacher text-to-image diffusion model and its distilled student version. As our main empirical finding, we discover that a noticeable portion of student samples exhibit superior fidelity compared to the teacher ones, despite the "approximate" nature of the student. Based on this finding, we propose an adaptive collaboration between student and teacher diffusion models for effective text-to-image synthesis. Specifically, the distilled model produces the initial sample, and then an oracle decides whether it needs further improvements with a slow teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the designed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art text-to-image alternatives for various inference budgets in terms of human preference. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be naturally used in popular applications such as text-guided image editing and controllable generation.

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arXiv2023

Is This Loss Informative? Faster Text-to-Image Customization by Tracking Objective Dynamics

Text-to-image generation models represent the next step of evolution in image synthesis, offering a natural way to achieve flexible yet fine-grained control over the result. One emerging area of research is the fast adaptation of large text-to-image models to smaller datasets or new visual concepts. However, many efficient methods of adaptation have a long training time, which limits their practical applications, slows down experiments, and spends excessive GPU resources. In this work, we study the training dynamics of popular text-to-image personalization methods (such as Textual Inversion or DreamBooth), aiming to speed them up. We observe that most concepts are learned at early stages and do not improve in quality later, but standard training convergence metrics fail to indicate that. Instead, we propose a simple drop-in early stopping criterion that only requires computing the regular training objective on a fixed set of inputs for all training iterations. Our experiments on Stable Diffusion for 48 different concepts and three personalization methods demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach, which makes adaptation up to 8 times faster with no significant drops in quality.

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