An Efficient Retrieval-Based Method for Tabular Prediction with LLM

Abstract

Tabular prediction, a well-established problem in machine learning, has consistently garnered significant research attention within academia and industry. Recently, with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), there has been increasing exploration of how to apply LLMs to tabular prediction tasks. Many existing methods, however, typically rely on extensive pre-training or fine-tuning of LLMs, which demands considerable computational resources. To avoid this, we propose a retrieval-based approach that utilizes the powerful capabilities of LLMs in representation, comprehension, and inference. Our approach eliminates the need for training any modules or performing data augmentation, depending solely on information from target dataset. Experimental results reveal that, even without specialized training for tabular data, our method exhibits strong predictive performance on tabular prediction task, affirming its practicality and effectiveness.