RAD-TFM: Robust and Domain-Adapted Tabular Foundation Models

The development of tabular foundation models (TFMs) has accelerated in recent years, showing strong potential to outperform traditional ML methods for structured data. A key finding is that TFMs can be pretrained entirely on synthetic datasets, opening opportunities to design data generators that encourage desirable model properties. Prior work has mainly focused on crafting high-quality priors over generators to improve overall pretraining performance. Our insight is that parameterizing the generator distribution enables an adversarial, distributional robustness perspective: during training, we can adapt the generator to emphasize datasets that are particularly challenging for the model, which we formalize by introducing an optimality gap measure. Further, we develop a method to align the synthetic data generation with real-world datasets from a given domain, constraining the adversary to generate "realistic'" data. Together, these algorithms comprise the Robust and Domain-Adapted Tabular Foundation Models (RAD-TFM) pipeline, a model-agnostic adversarial training framework. Applied to the TabPFN V2 classifier, RAD-TFM improves performance across 6 diverse tabular benchmarks, with up to a 11% increase in mean normalized AUC over the original TabPFN and other baseline algorithms, with only 100k additional training datasets, less than 0.1% of the original pretraining data. These results highlight a promising new direction for targeted adversarial training and fine-tuning of TFMs using synthetic data alone.