CoolFace
Datasetpublic

EvalData/TabMI-Bench

TabMI-Bench A protocol benchmark for mechanistic interpretability (MI) of tabular foundation models (TFMs). NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations & Datasets Track submission. What's in this dataset This Hugging Face repository hosts the frozen aggregated artifacts that drive every numbered table and figure in the paper. Bundling these allows reviewers to verify the paper's key numerics without re-running 40 GPU-hours of experiments. File Source experiment Used by… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EvalData/TabMI-Bench.

sourceHugging Facemitupdated 5mo agoView on Hugging Face
0likes64downloads
Dataset Card

TabMI-Bench

A protocol benchmark for mechanistic interpretability (MI) of tabular foundation models (TFMs). NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations & Datasets Track submission.

What's in this dataset

This Hugging Face repository hosts the frozen aggregated artifacts that drive every numbered table and figure in the paper. Bundling these allows reviewers to verify the paper's key numerics without re-running 40 GPU-hours of experiments.

FileSource experimentUsed by
rd5_fullscale_aggregated.jsonPhase 5 multi-seed core comparison (5 seeds × 3 models × 4 functions)Table 1 (3 strategies), Figure 1
tabdpt_probing_3seed.jsonTabDPT in-family holdout probing (3 seeds)Table 1 TabDPT row, §4.3
tabdpt_causal_3seed.jsonTabDPT noising-based causal tracing (3 seeds)§4.4 TabDPT causal claim
nam_holdout.jsonNAM out-of-family holdout (5 seeds)§4.3 NAM holdout boundary case
lofo_primary_endpoint.jsonLeave-one-function-out robustness on primary endpointLOFO appendix
c1c2_baselines.jsonShuffled-label and random-target negative controls§4.6, Tables 21–22
scale_10k_multiseed.jsonN=10K probing scale validation (3 seeds)Appendix G
tabpfn25_fullscale_aggregated.jsonTabPFN v2 vs v2.5 comparison (3 seeds)Table 7, §G.1

Code & full benchmark suite

The hooks, synthetic probe generators, evaluation scripts, statistical analysis, figure generation, and tests are hosted at: <https://github.com/evaldataset/TabMI-Bench>

To regenerate paper-facing tables and figures from this dataset without GPU access:

bash
git clone https://github.com/evaldataset/TabMI-Bench
cd TabMI-Bench
pip install -r requirements.txt
make reproduce-paper-frozen

What is TabMI-Bench?

TabMI-Bench provides:

  1. 1.Hook-based activation extraction for 5 TFMs spanning 3 architectural families (TabPFN v2/v2.5, TabICL v2, TabDPT, iLTM) plus NAM out-of-family holdout
  2. 2.4 controlled synthetic probe families (bilinear, sinusoidal, polynomial, mixed) with known ground-truth intermediary variables
  3. 3.4-step evaluation protocol (synthetic profile → causal validation → negative controls → real-world transfer)
  4. 4.Evidence-coded MI applicability matrix (8 techniques × 4 architectures with seed-count superscripts)
  5. 5.A primary diagnostic finding: whole-layer clean activation patching is uninformative on ICL-style TFMs due to deterministic cascading; corruption-based (noising) tracing is the informative alternative.

Three descriptive reference computation profiles emerge as calibration baselines:

  • Staged (TabPFN): U-shaped intermediary recoverability with mid-layer concentration
  • Distributed (TabICL, TabDPT): uniformly high recoverability across layers
  • Preprocessing-dominant (iLTM): tree+PCA preprocessing performs the heavy lifting

Croissant 1.0 metadata

The repository includes croissant.json with 12 RAI fields (data limitations, biases, sensitive information, use cases, social impact, synthetic data flag, source datasets, provenance, collection, maintenance plan, etc.). See croissant.json in the repository.

Source datasets

Real-world evaluation uses public datasets only (no new collection):

DatasetSourceLicenseUse
California HousingOpenML 8092CC0causal tracing + steering
Diabetesscikit-learnBSD-3-Clausecausal tracing + steering
Wine QualityOpenML 287CC0steering
Bike SharingOpenML 44063CC0steering
Abalone, Boston, Energy, Breast Cancer, Iris, Adult, Credit-GOpenML / scikit-learnCC0 / BSD-3-Clausecausal tracing

Citation

bibtex
@inproceedings{anonymous2026tabmibench,
  title={TabMI-Bench: Evaluating Mechanistic Interpretability Methods Across Tabular Foundation Model Architectures},
  author={Anonymous},
  booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Evaluations \& Datasets Track},
  year={2026}
}

License

MIT. See LICENSE.