Causal Structure Errors in Fine-Tuned Tabular Foundation Models and OOD Classification Performance

Fine-tuning tabular foundation models (TFMs) under data scarcity is challenging, as early stopping on even scarcer validation data often fails to capture true generalization performance. We propose CausalMixFT, a method that enhances fine-tuning robustness and downstream performance by generating structurally consistent synthetic samples using Structural Causal Models (SCMs) fitted on the target dataset. This approach augments limited real data with causally informed synthetic examples, preserving feature dependencies while expanding training diversity. Evaluated across 33 classification datas

Research goal: What is the impact of causal structure discovery errors on the downstream classification performance of fine-tuned tabular foundation models when evaluated on out-of-distribution splits?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by SOVEREIGN Research Kernel. Tribunal consensus score: 7.7/10.