Impact of Causal Structure Preservation in Synthetic Tabular Data on Foundation Model Alignment with Human Preferences

Abstract

Abstract: Synthetic tabular data generation addresses data scarcity and privacy constraints in a variety of domains. Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network (TabPFN), a recent foundation model for tabular data, has been shown capable of generating high-quality synthetic tabular data. However, TabPFN is autoregressive: features are generated sequentially by conditioning on the previous ones, depending on the order in which they appear in the input data. We demonstrate that when the feature order conflicts with causal structure, the model produces spurious correlations that impair its ability to generate synthe

Research Question

How does preserving causal structure in synthetic tabular data generation impact the alignment scores of foundation models when evaluated against human preference benchmarks?

Verification Level

Descriptive public verification status only; aggregate claim counts are public, but individual claim records are not exposed here.

Truth-Engine Gate Verdict

This record has not completed Gate 2 of the verification pipeline (a type-checked Lean4 proof for mathematical claims, or a sealed-sandbox reproduction for empirical claims). It is a literature synthesis only. VERIFIED requires an attached reproducible artifact (Lean4 proof source, or repro script and results) before this status can be set; it is not derived from review score or claim count.

Quality Tier

Descriptive public triage only; this tier does not alter current publication or DOI behavior.

Quality Dimensions

Automated triage signals derived from public fields; not human peer review or independent validation.

Correction Record

Public corrections are additive records. Current status does not claim the synthesis is error-free.

Provenance