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.
>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.
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.
https://research.google/blog/introducing-tabfm-a-zero-shot-f...
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.
Sigh. So this is somewhat interesting niche academic research but utterly irrelevant to real-world use cases.