TabGift: A Context-Efficient Foundation Model for Tabular Data Generation

Abstract

Tabular data generation aims to synthesize realistic samples from limited observations while faithfully capturing the underlying data distribution. Tabular foundation models (TFMs), pretrained on diverse tabular tasks and adapted through in-context learning, have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities, suggesting the potential of extending this paradigm to tabular data generation. However, the strong predictive performance of TFMs often relies on sufficiently large context sets, whereas tabular generation is typically needed precisely when target data are scarce. Extending the foundation-model paradigm to generation therefore requires reliable distribution inference from only a limited context. To this end, we propose TabGift, a context-efficient tabular foundation model enabling both efficient distribution modeling and effective generation from only a few context samples. TabGift maps heterogeneous tables into a shared latent space with a pretrained tabular encoder, where an in-context diffusion model learns to denoise latent samples conditioned on a small set of clean examples. This design transfers generative priors across datasets and enables distribution inference from limited context, while a lightweight dataset-specific MLP decoder maps generated representations back to the original data space. Experiments on 7 classification and 11 regression datasets show that TabGift consistently outperforms representative baselines in synthetic data quality, with particularly strong gains under limited-context settings, while achieving substantially faster adaptation and generation.