TabDeco: A Comprehensive Contrastive Framework for Decoupled Representations in Tabular Data

Representation learning is a fundamental aspect of modern artificial intelligence, driving substantial improvements across diverse applications. While selfsupervised contrastive learning has led to significant advancements in fields like computer vision and natural language processing, its adaptation to tabular data presents unique challenges. Traditional approaches often prioritize optimizing model architecture and loss functions but may overlook the crucial task of constructing meaningful positive and negative sample pairs from various perspectives like feature interactions, instance-level patterns and batch-specific contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce TabDeco, a novel method that leverages attention-based encoding strategies across both rows and columns and employs contrastive learning framework to effectively disentangle feature representations at multiple levels, including features, instances and data batches. With the innovative feature decoupling hierarchies, TabDeco consistently surpasses existing deep learning methods and leading gradient boosting algorithms, including XG-Boost, CatBoost, and LightGBM, across various benchmark tasks, underscoring its effectiveness in advancing tabular data representation learning.

SwitchTab: Switched Autoencoders Are Effective Tabular Learners

Self-supervised representation learning methods have achieved significant success in computer vision and natural language processing, where data samples exhibit explicit spatial or semantic dependencies. However, applying these methods to tabular data is challenging due to the less pronounced dependencies among data samples. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SwitchTab, a novel self-supervised method specifically designed to capture latent dependencies in tabular data. SwitchTab leverages an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework to decouple mutual and salient features among data pairs, resulting in more representative embeddings. These embeddings, in turn, contribute to better decision boundaries and lead to improved results in downstream tasks. To validate the effectiveness of SwitchTab, we conduct extensive experiments across various domains involving tabular data. The results showcase superior performance in end-to-end prediction tasks with fine-tuning. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained salient embeddings can be utilized as plug-and-play features to enhance the performance of various traditional classification methods (e.g., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, etc.). Lastly, we highlight the capability of SwitchTab to create explainable representations through visualization of decoupled mutual and salient features in the latent space.