ElTab: Elastically Looped Tabular Transformers
Mieszko Komisarczyk, Saurabh Mathur, Maurice Kraus, Sriraam Natarajan, Kristian Kersting
Abstract
Tabular transformer models such as TabPFN achieve strong predictive performance but incur substantial inference costs, making them difficult to deploy in resource-constrained settings. While looped transformers reduce parameter count through weight sharing, they can lose significant predictive power when stopped early. To address this challenge, we introduce the Elastically Looped Tabular Transformer (ElTab), a single model trained to operate across different computational budgets through supervision at randomly sampled early exits. Across 30 OpenML classification datasets, a single ElTab model matches six depth-specific looped models while cutting training cost by more than half, and matches a 12-layer TabPFN-style baseline with 25% fewer inference FLOPs. These results show that elastic-depth training yields a single model that adapts to the deployment budget at hand, offering a favorable trade-off among predictive performance, storage, and computational cost.