Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction

44 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by sbulaev

9 Comments

rustyconover

a few seconds ago

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

_joel

an hour ago

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.

WhitneyLand

29 minutes ago

Nowhere in the paper do they mention the reasoning level or budget used for the experiments?

You’ve got to be kidding me. That one variable could make a huge difference in the results. I can’t understand why they would leave that out.

heaney-555

an hour ago

>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.

scott_s

19 minutes ago

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.

cyanregiment

3 hours ago

Just have 2 LLMs debate whether tabs or spaces are the superior choice