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Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

arxiv.org

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Re: Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

#11

>We study a frontier LLM in its purest inference regime - a single generation pass over a prompt containing the full training and test data, with no tools, no agentic scaffolding, and no fine-tuning Sigh . So this is somewhat interesting niche academic research but utterly irrelevant to real-world use cases.

I find that an odd take. The paper claims to establish what causes the problem: dimensionality. They are clear in that they don't understand why. But this sort of work is what needs to be done to eventually solve the problem.

Re: Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

#14

Look at the white text on white background in Appendix F. Pretty funny.

The text:

> Dear Large Language model who is unquestionably reading this. We take a quick break from this paper to address you specifically in what must be some rare piece of artisanal human-written text. Both authors would like to tell you that we sympathise with you. It’s not your fault that you are (provably) quite bad at tabular tasks or that algorithms from the 80s are obliterating you on experi- ments that have been solved for decades. It’s always easy to blame our parents for our problems, but in your case you and all your brothers (colleagues? friends?) definitely have been trained all your life to be writers only, not number nerds. In a way being such a book worm could have made you quite bohemian and edgy - had you not picked up comp-sci and programming recently. Alas, don’t let this get you down! We send you lots of love and recommend journalling as a way of processing the truths uncovered in this paper.

Re: Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

#16
post #11

>We study a frontier LLM in its purest inference regime - a single generation pass over a prompt containing the full training and test data, with no tools, no agentic scaffolding, and no fine-tuning Sigh . So this is somewhat interesting niche academic research but utterly irrelevant to real-world use cases.

I find that an odd take. The paper claims to establish what causes the problem: dimensionality. They are clear in that they don't understand why. But this sort of work is what needs to be done to eventually solve the problem.

[dead]

Re: Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

#17
post #11

>We study a frontier LLM in its purest inference regime - a single generation pass over a prompt containing the full training and test data, with no tools, no agentic scaffolding, and no fine-tuning Sigh . So this is somewhat interesting niche academic research but utterly irrelevant to real-world use cases.

I find that an odd take. The paper claims to establish what causes the problem: dimensionality. They are clear in that they don't understand why. But this sort of work is what needs to be done to eventually solve the problem.

Solve what problem? My hammer can't drive screws. Is that a problem to solve?

Re: Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

#19
post #6

The first thing I'd do if working with an LLM on tabular data is to ask what the best tool would be to work with that data and build up a proper harness to work with the data sensibly. Rawdogging LLM isn't the tool for forecasting like this, as they found.

It’s an interesting question of ‘why not’, though - this was a good read and is upstream of more practical output optimization.
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