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REVIEW 3 major objections 6 minor 106 references

Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard

T0 review · 3 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-15 · deepseek-v4-flash

Pith's one-line read A chain of tabular thoughts lets an LLM act as an instance-wise ensemble expert, achieving the best average ranking across TinyBench2 classification and regression tasks.

desk verdict Novel LLM-as-ensemble-aggregator idea, but the main evaluation feeds in-sample neighbor predictions to the LLM, so the reported gains are probably inflated. read the letter →

arxiv 2505.13421 v1 pith:WDI7B4PU submitted 2025-05-19 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords tabulardataensemblelearninglargelanguagemodelschain-of-thoughtpromptinginstance-wisepredictionretrieval-augmentedcontextmodelselectionTinyBench2
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

CoT2 is a method for tabular prediction that delegates model ensembling to a large language model. For every test row, it builds a prompt from the row's nearest neighbors, their true labels, the predictions of several trained external models, and dataset-level statistics such as class balance and per-model training and validation accuracy. A four-step chain of thought—select well-performing models, discard outlier neighbors, choose locally suitable models, then decide—guides the LLM to an instance-specific integration of the external votes. On the TinyBench2 benchmark the authors report the best average ranking among all compared methods on classification and regression tasks, ahead of standard voting rules, best-model selection, and a non-LLM meta-learner. A consensus gate that skips LLM calls on easy rows further reduces inference cost.

What carries the argument

The load-bearing mechanism is the tabular context, a per-instance prompt assembled without raw features: the $K$ nearest neighbors (found by Manhattan distance re-weighted with mutual information), their true labels, each external model's predictions on neighbors and target, the external models' training and validation accuracies, and label frequencies (classification) or label range (regression). Carrying the reasoning is the Chain of Tabular Thoughts (CoT2), a four-step prompting strategy that asks the LLM to (a) identify well-performing models, (b) flag outlier neighbors, (c) select the models most suited to the clean local neighborhood, and (d) make the final prediction by combining local labels with the chosen models' outputs. A consensus threshold (agreement of at least $\tau = 3/4$ of external models) decides which instances skip LLM inference entirely.

What would settle it

Replace the in-sample neighbor predictions in the prompt with out-of-fold predictions (each neighbor excluded from the training of the models that predict it) and rerun the TinyBench2 comparison; if CoT2's best average ranking falls behind standard weighted voting, the gain came from in-sample optimism rather than genuine local model selection.

Watch

Extended reading notes

Core claim

The paper's central discovery claim is that a large language model, given no raw features and no semantic descriptions, can act as a competition-style ensemble expert by reading a structured 'tabular context'. The context encodes the local evidence around each test instance: the true labels and external-model predictions of its nearest neighbors, the external models' predictions on the target itself, the models' training and validation accuracies, and the label distribution. CoT2 then instructs the LLM to reason in four explicit steps, first filtering models and neighbor outliers, then selecting models that fit the local neighborhood, and finally combining local neighbor labels with the chosen models' votes. The authors report that this instance-wise, LLM-driven integration achieves the best average ranking on TinyBench2 classification and regression tasks, improving on the same LLM prompted without the chain of thought and on all static ensemble baselines.

Load-bearing premise

The load-bearing premise is that how well external models predict on the training-set neighbors of a target tells the LLM how well those models will predict on the target itself, even though those neighbor predictions are in-sample and therefore optimistically biased.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • CoT2 achieves the best average ranking across 30 TinyBench2 classification datasets and the best average ranking across 15 regression datasets, surpassing all single models and all tested static ensemble rules.
  • Adding the four-step chain of thought improves accuracy over the same LLM using the bare tabular context; for example, gpt-3.5-turbo mean accuracy rises from 84.79 to 86.85 on five reported datasets.
  • The consensus gate skips LLM inference for the majority of easy test rows, so the method preserves most of its accuracy while substantially lowering inference cost.
  • Anonymizing external model names improves performance on four of five datasets, suggesting the LLM can reason from model behavior rather than model identity.
  • Increasing the external model pool size and including stronger models improves CoT2's accuracy, so the framework benefits from richer ensembles.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • A testable extension the paper does not run: feed the LLM out-of-fold neighbor predictions (each neighbor predicted by models trained without it); the result would separate genuine local model competence from agreement that an in-sample fit can produce.
  • The tabular context could drive other LLM outputs besides a single label, such as a confidence score, an abstention decision, or a natural-language explanation of which models were trusted and why; the paper's framework already supplies the evidence for such outputs.
  • The consensus gate is set at a fixed threshold $\tau = 3/4$; the paper's own ablation shows accuracy and inference cost both change with $\tau$, so per-dataset threshold tuning or learning the threshold from validation data is a plausible way to push the cost-accuracy frontier.
  • Because the LLM never sees feature values, the same interface could be deployed as a model-votes-only API for privacy-sensitive tabular data, with external models running locally and only non-semantic predictions leaving the data owner's environment.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

3 major / 6 minor

Summary. The paper proposes CoT^2 (Chain of Tabular Thoughts), a prompting strategy that uses a large language model (LLM) to perform instance-wise integration of predictions from an external pool of tabular models. For each test instance, the method builds a tabular context from the true labels and model predictions of its nearest neighbors in the training set, plus dataset-level statistics, and guides the LLM through four reasoning steps: well-performing model selection, outlier identification, suitable model selection, and final prediction. The method is evaluated on the TinyBench2 benchmark across 30 classification and 15 regression datasets, reporting the best average ranking among a broad set of baselines, including a non-LLM context-based baseline called MetaXGB.

Significance. If the reported results are trustworthy, the paper would introduce a meaningful new application of LLMs as interpretable ensemble meta-learners for tabular data, with a privacy-friendly context that avoids raw features and semantic descriptions. The idea of letting an LLM select and combine local model predictions through structured reasoning is novel and of broad interest. The manuscript also includes a useful non-LLM baseline and an ablation study. However, the strength of the empirical claim is weakened by a load-bearing methodological issue: the local model selection step uses in-sample neighbor predictions, which are optimistically biased, and the study design has a self-benchmarking overlap and hyperparameter tuning on the evaluation datasets. These issues preclude accepting the central claim without additional experiments.

major comments (3)
  1. [Section 3.3 / Eq. (5)] The 'Suitable Model Selection' step selects the most suitable external models for the target instance by evaluating their predictions on the K nearest neighbors retrieved from the training set D. Since all external models are trained on D, these neighbor predictions are in-sample and optimistically biased; for KNN they can be near-perfect regardless of out-of-sample performance. The prompt in Figure 2 even shows KNN with training accuracy 1.00 while its neighbor predictions disagree with several true labels, illustrating exactly this memorization-vs-generalization confusion. The paper does not establish that in-sample agreement on training neighbors is a valid proxy for model quality on the target, so the claimed gains over fixed ensembles may be largely an artifact of the LLM selecting models that memorized the retrieved points rather than models that generalize locally. I request the authors to either retrieve neighbors from a held-out validation set (where model predictions are out-of-sample) or use cross-validated predictions on the training set, and rerun the main comparisons; they should also report how often the models selected in step c actually outperform the globally best model on the corresponding validation neighborhoods.
  2. [Section 4.3 / Appendix B] The hyperparameters (number of neighbors k=10, hard-sample threshold tau=3/4, temperature 0.2, and the choice of distance metric) are ablated and effectively tuned on the same five datasets (BAS, DIS, SYL, CRE, FOR) that are also used in the main comparison in Table 1 and in Figures 4-8. This creates a risk of selection bias: the reported performance on those datasets may be optimistic because the method is tuned on the evaluation set. The authors should use a separate dataset-level validation split for hyperparameter selection or justify why the chosen values are dataset-independent a priori; at minimum, the paper should acknowledge this overlap and report results with a fixed default configuration on all datasets.
  3. [Section 4.2] The paper claims that CoT2 'significantly outperforms' MetaXGB, but the per-dataset results in Table 4 show that CoT2-Deepseek-v3 loses to MetaXGB on BAS (94.55 vs 95.52), WQW (63.59 vs 63.67), and JC2 (95.26 vs 98.57), and ties on VUL. The Wilcoxon-Holm critical-difference diagram is the only statistical evidence, but the exact p-values or the number of wins/losses across the 30 datasets are not reported in the text. I ask the authors to report the paired test statistics and to clarify whether the advantage over MetaXGB and over the simple Averaging baseline is significant at the 0.05 level after correction; this is important because the regression results in Table 5 show CoT2 with average rank 3.00 versus Simple Average rank 3.67, which is a much smaller margin than the classification diagram suggests.
minor comments (6)
  1. [Section 4.1] The evaluation protocol repeats each experiment with five random seeds and reports mean ± std, but the LLM inference temperature is 0.2; the reported variance likely reflects both model training randomness and LLM sampling stochasticity. The authors should clarify whether the LLM responses are fixed across seeds or resampled, and whether the same LLM output is used for all five runs per dataset.
  2. [Section 2.4] The claim that 'no prior work has explored using LLMs as intelligent ensemble experts' is too strong; there are existing works on LLM-based ensembling of model predictions (e.g., LLM-Blender) and on LLMs for model selection. The authors should soften this novelty claim and cite relevant prior art.
  3. [Appendix D] The regression prompt in Figure 10 contains a regex extraction error: the text in Section 3.3 says the regex is changed to '(-?d+.d+)' but the displayed code still uses 'I predict the label of the target instance as (\d+)'. Also, the backslashes in the regex are missing in the text. This should be corrected for reproducibility.
  4. [Section 3.3] The notation for the number of selected models is confusing: the paper writes 'M_s' for both the set of models and its cardinality. Please use a clearer notation, e.g., 'S' for the selected set and '|S|' for its size.
  5. [Section 3.2] Equation (2) includes '{y_j}_{j=1}^N' as an input to the context function, but the surrounding text inputs the entire dataset label set only as a label range/frequency summary. This is inconsistent; the authors should either remove that term or clarify that it denotes the label frequencies.
  6. [Section 4.1] The evaluation uses TinyBench2, which is introduced in reference [74] by the same research group that authors this paper, and the model implementations are built on TALENT ([49], also the authors' group). This does not invalidate the results, but the paper should explicitly acknowledge the potential conflict and provide a brief external sanity check, for example by reporting results on a few datasets from an independent benchmark.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 2.0 of 10

No derivation-level circularity; mild same-group benchmark and toolbox self-citations are not load-bearing.

full rationale

The paper's core pipeline is not circular. External models are trained on the training split, their validation accuracies come from a held-out validation split, and the LLM's final prediction in Eq. 7 is a free decision over independent inputs (neighbor labels, model predictions, and accuracies); no equation in Section 3 forces the output to equal any input by construction. The central empirical claim is evaluated against numerous external baselines (XGBoost, CatBoost, TabR, TabPFN, etc.), giving it independent grounding. The TinyBench2 benchmark [74] and TALENT toolbox [49] are authored by the same group, but they serve as dataset collection and tuning infrastructure rather than as evidence for the method's mechanism, so these self-citations are not load-bearing. The ablation on five datasets that also appear in the main comparison is a minor validation-design caveat, but it does not amount to a fitted parameter being renamed as a prediction or any derivation-level circularity.

Assumptions & free parameters 3 free parameters · 6 assumptions · 0 invented entities

No new physical or mathematical entities are introduced. The method relies on a standard supervised-learning setup plus an LLM, with hand-chosen hyperparameters and a local-transfer assumption about in-sample neighbor predictions.

free parameters (3)
  • Number of neighbors k = 10
    Set in main experiments; the ablation in Figure 5 justifies the choice, but it is not derived from theory.
  • Hard-sample agreement threshold tau = 3/4
    Instances with at least three quarters of external models agreeing skip LLM inference; the ablation in Table 3 shows non-monotonic accuracy across thresholds.
  • LLM inference temperature = 0.2
    Chosen for stable outputs; the ablation in Figure 8 shows robustness across values, but the main results depend on this sampling choice.
assumptions (6)
  • domain assumption Mutual information between each feature and the label is a valid measure of feature relevance for neighbor search in Equation 1.
    Invoked in Section 3.2 to define the re-weighted distance; if irrelevant features dominate after normalization, the retrieved neighbors may be uninformative.
  • domain assumption The correctness of external models on training-set neighbors is informative about their suitability for the test target.
    This is the load-bearing local-transfer premise behind steps b and c in Section 3.3; because the neighbor predictions are in-sample, the premise is questionable.
  • domain assumption A large language model can perform reliable multi-step numerical reasoning over a purely symbolic tabular context and emit a parseable answer.
    The entire CoT2 method relies on this capability; the paper provides qualitative examples but no systematic success-rate measurement across all datasets.
  • ad hoc to paper The four hand-crafted reasoning steps constitute a good expert strategy for ensembling.
    The steps are designed by the authors and are not derived or automatically searched; an alternative decomposition might perform differently.
  • domain assumption TinyBench2 is representative of tabular benchmarks and its rankings are stable.
    The paper relies on TinyBench2, authored by the same group, as a proxy for broader tabular performance; Section 4.1 states that the subset preserves rankings.
  • domain assumption The validation split is sufficient for early stopping and model selection without overfitting.
    Standard practice, but the CoT2 hyperparameters are not separately tuned on a held-out model-selection split beyond the reported ablations.

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Pith. "Pith review of Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/WDI7B4PU

@misc{pith2026250513421,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/WDI7B4PU}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.13421}
}
abstract

Tabular data, a fundamental data format in machine learning, is predominantly utilized in competitions and real-world applications. The performance of tabular models--such as gradient boosted decision trees and neural networks--can vary significantly across datasets due to differences in feature distributions and task characteristics. Achieving top performance on each dataset often requires specialized expert knowledge. To address this variability, practitioners often aggregate the predictions of multiple models. However, conventional aggregation strategies typically rely on static combination rules and lack instance-level adaptability. In this work, we propose an in-context ensemble framework for tabular prediction that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform dynamic, instance-specific integration of external model predictions. Without access to raw tabular features or semantic information, our method constructs a context around each test instance using its nearest neighbors and the predictions from a pool of external models. Within this enriched context, we introduce Chain of Tabular Thoughts (CoT$^2$), a prompting strategy that guides LLMs through multi-step, interpretable reasoning, making still further progress toward expert-level decision-making. Experimental results show that our method outperforms well-tuned baselines and standard ensemble techniques across a wide range of tabular datasets.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2505.13421 by the authors.

Figure 1
Figure 1. CoT2 utilizes the expert knowledge of LLMs to create an intelligent ensemble of tabular models, making still further progress. To address the question above, our central idea is to empower LLMs to act like human experts in machine learning competitions: rather than directly accessing raw features, the LLM inte￾grates multiple model predictions at the instance level, forming a dynamic ensemble guided by contextual kn… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. An example of a binary classification task using the tabular context and Chain of Tabular [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Critical difference diagram based on the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_3.png] view at source ↗
Figures from the paper (11 more)
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Impact of external model set size and quality on the performance of CoT [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p010_4.png]
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Performance of CoT2 under different numbers of neighbors k used in the context. The effectiveness of CoT2 helps bridge the performance gap between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o in this specific reasoning task, demonstrating that our designed reasoning steps align with the more ad…
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: In the process of nearest neighbor search, we used the Manhattan distance reweighted by [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_6.png]
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Impact of anonymizing external model names in the tabular context on CoT [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_7.png]
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Effect of temperature setting on CoT2 ’s performance. We evaluate four values: t = 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, and 1.0. Results show that CoT2 is generally robust to temperature changes, with performance remaining stable across different t values. However, higher temperatures lead …
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: An example of the prompt in the classification dataset CRE. We also provided examples [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p021_9.png]
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: An example of the prompt in the regression dataset KIN. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p022_10.png]
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: The response from gpt-3.5-turbo with CoT [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p023_11.png]
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: The response from gpt-3.5-turbo without CoT [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p023_12.png]
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: The response from gpt-4o for Figure 9, where the true label corresponding to the question [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p024_13.png]
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Step 2 of the response generated by the latest ChatGPT model for the example in Figure 9. 图片由 MarkdownToImage 生成 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_16.png]

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    Label 0 — All correct → ✅ Outliers: Neighbors 5 and 6 Borderline (keep for now): Neighbors 3 and 4 Non-outliers: Neighbors 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 图片由MarkdownToImage生成 Figure 16: Step 2 of the response generated by the latest ChatGPT model for the example in Figure 9. 27 Step ...

Pith tools

Reviewed August 15, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.