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 →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
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.
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
- 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.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
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)
- [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.
- [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.
- [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)
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [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
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
free parameters (3)
- Number of neighbors k =
10
- Hard-sample agreement threshold tau =
3/4
- LLM inference temperature =
0.2
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.
- domain assumption The correctness of external models on training-set neighbors is informative about their suitability for the test target.
- domain assumption A large language model can perform reliable multi-step numerical reasoning over a purely symbolic tabular context and emit a parseable answer.
- ad hoc to paper The four hand-crafted reasoning steps constitute a good expert strategy for ensembling.
- domain assumption TinyBench2 is representative of tabular benchmarks and its rankings are stable.
- domain assumption The validation split is sufficient for early stopping and model selection without overfitting.
Cite this review
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 from the paper (11 more)
Reference graph
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I predict the label of the target instance as [Your Answer]
Based on the true labels of the non-outlier neighbors, the label frequencies, and the target instance’s predicted labels from the most suitable models and well-performing models, list the labels of the non-outlier neighbors and the predictions of the most suitable models on th...
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Then you select well-performing models from external models
Based on the training accuracies and validation accuracies of each model, You infer the overall performance of the external models on the dataset. Then you select well-performing models from external models. We aim for you to identify overfitting and underfitting models based ...
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[91]
If the majority of well-performing models predict incorrectly for a particular neighbor, it suggests that this neighbor might be an outlier, negatively affecting the predictions
Based on the true labels of the neighbors, the neighbors’ predicted labels from well-performing models, and the label frequencies, you identify non-outliers among the neighbors. If the majority of well-performing models predict incorrectly for a particular neighbor, it suggest...
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[92]
Models that perform well overall on the dataset may not be the most efficient at predicting the target instance
Based on the true labels of the non-outliers, the non-outliers’ predicted labels from all models, and the label frequencies, you select the most suitable models for the neighborhood space of the target instance. Models that perform well overall on the dataset may not be the mo...
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[93]
I predict the label of the target instance as [Your Answer]
Based on the true labels of the non-outlier neighbors, the label frequencies, and the target instance’s predicted labels from the most suitable models and well-performing models, list the labels of the non-outlier neighbors and the predictions of the most suitable models on th...
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[94]
Based on the training and validation accuracies of the external models, we can infer the overall performance on the dataset. The models with high training and validation accuracies such as lightgbm (0.8168 training, 0.7764 validation) and xgboost (0.8020 training, 0.7809 valid...
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[95]
1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 are non-outliers as they have a majority of correct predictions from well-performing models
Identifying non-outliers among the neighbors: - No. 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 are non-outliers as they have a majority of correct predictions from well-performing models. - No. 3, 5, 8 are outliers as most of the well-performing models predict incorrectly for them
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[96]
Selecting the most suitable models for the target instance: Based on the non-outlier neighbors, the models that seem suitable for the target instance are knn, resnet, and ftt
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[97]
I predict the label of the target instance as 0
Final analysis: - Non-outlier neighbors’ labels: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 - Predictions from the most suitable models on the target instance: [knn pred: 0] [resnet pred: 0] [ftt pred: 0] Considering the majority label from the non-outlier neighbors and the predictions from...
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[98]
**Evaluate External Models:** - **Training vs. Validation Accuracy:** - **KNN:** Training: 0.6934, Validation: 0.6654 (Slight overfitting) - **XGBoost:** Training: 0.8020, Validation: 0.7809 (Good performance, slight overfitting) - **CatBoost:** Training: 0.7850, Validation: 0...
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[99]
- Neighbors 3, 5, 8 have true label 1
**Identify Non-Outliers Among Neighbors:** - **Neighbor Analysis:** - Neighbors 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 have true label 0. - Neighbors 3, 5, 8 have true label 1. - **Outlier Detection:** - Neighbor 8 is an outlier as all models predict 1, but most neighbors are labeled 0. - Neigh...
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[100]
- MLP, ResNet, AutoInt, FTT consistently predict 0 for non-outliers
**Select Suitable Models for Neighborhood:** - **Non-Outlier Neighbors:** 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 (all true label 0) - **Model Performance on Non-Outliers:** - XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM show some incorrect predictions on non-outliers. - MLP, ResNet, AutoInt, FTT consistently pr...
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[101]
**Final Prediction Using KNN and Model Ensembling:** - **Non-Outlier Neighbors’ True Labels:** All are 0. - **Target Instance Predictions from Suitable Models:** - MLP: 0, ResNet: 0, AutoInt: 0, FTT: 0 - **Well-Performing Models’ Predictions on Target:** - XGBoost: 1, CatBoost...
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[103]
Label 0 — All well-performing models predicted 0 → ✅ correct
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[104]
Label 1 — xgboost: 0 ❌ , catboost: 1 ✅ , lightgbm: 1 ✅ , ftt: 0 ❌ → 2 correct, 2 incorrect → borderline
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[105]
Label 0 — xgboost: 1 ❌ , catboost: 0 ✅ , lightgbm: 1 ❌ , ftt: 0 ✅ → 2 correct, 2 incorrect → borderline
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[106]
Label 1 — xgboost: 0 ❌ , catboost: 0 ❌ , lightgbm: 1 ✅ , ftt: 0 ❌ → 1 correct, 3 incorrect → likely ❌ outlier
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[107]
Label 0 — xgboost: 1 ❌ , catboost: 1 ❌ , lightgbm: 1 ❌ , ftt: 0 ✅ → 1 correct, 3 incorrect → ❌ outlier
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[109]
Label 1 — All correct → ✅
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[110]
Label 0 — All correct → ✅
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[111]
27 Step 3: Select Most Suitable Models in the Neighborhood Now we evaluate how each model performs on the non-outlier neighbors (Neighbors 1,2,3,4,7,8,9,10)
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 ...
Reviewed August 15, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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