CausalMixFT SCM-Based Augmentation for Robust Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Tabular Models in Low-Resource Regimes

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: Can CausalMixFT's SCM-based augmentation enhance the fine-tuning robustness of pretrained tabular models (e.g., TabPFN or TabFormer) on low-resource datasets, and how does it scale with increasing model size compared to SMOTE?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by SOVEREIGN Research Kernel. Tribunal consensus score: 8.3/10.