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 substantially improving tabular MLPs; namely, parameter-efficient ensembling -- a paradigm for imitating an ensemble of models with just one model.We start by describing TabM -- a simple model based on MLP and BatchEnsemble (an existing technique), improved with our custom modifications.Then, 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.In particular, we find that TabM outperforms prior tabular DL models, while the complexity of attention- and retrieval-based methods does not pay off.Lastly, we conduct a detailed empirical analysis, that sheds some light on the high performance of TabM.For example, we show that parameter-efficient ensembling is not an arbitrary trick, but rather a highly effective way to reduce overfitting and improve optimization dynamics of tabular MLPs.Overall, our work brings an impactful technique to tabular DL, analyses its behaviour, and advances the performance-efficiency tradeoff with TabM -- a simple and powerful baseline for researchers and practitioners.