111
0

Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard

Main:10 Pages
18 Figures
Bibliography:5 Pages
6 Tables
Appendix:14 Pages
Abstract

Tabular data, a fundamental data format in machine learning, is predominantly utilized in competitions and real-world applications. The performance of tabular models--such as gradient boosted decision trees and neural networks--can vary significantly across datasets due to differences in feature distributions and task characteristics. Achieving top performance on each dataset often requires specialized expert knowledge. To address this variability, practitioners often aggregate the predictions of multiple models. However, conventional aggregation strategies typically rely on static combination rules and lack instance-level adaptability. In this work, we propose an in-context ensemble framework for tabular prediction that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform dynamic, instance-specific integration of external model predictions. Without access to raw tabular features or semantic information, our method constructs a context around each test instance using its nearest neighbors and the predictions from a pool of external models. Within this enriched context, we introduce Chain of Tabular Thoughts (CoT2^2), a prompting strategy that guides LLMs through multi-step, interpretable reasoning, making still further progress toward expert-level decision-making. Experimental results show that our method outperforms well-tuned baselines and standard ensemble techniques across a wide range of tabular datasets.

View on arXiv
@article{liu2025_2505.13421,
  title={ Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard },
  author={ Si-Yang Liu and Qile Zhou and Han-Jia Ye },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13421},
  year={ 2025 }
}
Comments on this paper

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our website, to show you personalized content and targeted ads, to analyze our website traffic, and to understand where our visitors are coming from. See our policy.