English

Hierarchical Synthetic Tabular Data Generation: A Hybrid Top-Down and Bottom-Up Framework

Machine Learning 2026-05-28 v1

Abstract

Existing approaches for synthetic tabular data generation are based on either purely generative models or LLMs, both of which struggle with data heterogeneity, logical consistency, rare-event coverage, and robustness in low-data regimes. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical hybrid top-down and bottom-up (H-TDBU) framework that decouples semantic structures from stochastic texture. In the top-down path, structure-driven logical constraints and cross-modal alignment rules are constructed, while in the bottom-up path, lightweight tabular generators are used to learn local statistical patterns from real data. The two paths are consolidated in a unified synthesis engine with an iterative feedback loop. We evaluate the framework on weak multimodal financial benchmarks combining tabular and sentiment-text data. Experimental results show that our H-TDBU approach improves train-synthetic-test-real performance over neural baseline methods while preserving semantic consistency. Our results suggest that hierarchical rule-guided synthesis provides an effective mechanism for combining controllability, semantic coherence, and statistical fidelity in synthetic data generation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.28198,
  title  = {Hierarchical Synthetic Tabular Data Generation: A Hybrid Top-Down and Bottom-Up Framework},
  author = {Junfeng Nie and Alvin Jin and Xiaohui Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28198},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted as a poster at FMSD @ ICML 2026. 9 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:36:44.446Z