English

TabMGP: Martingale Posterior with TabPFN

Methodology 2026-05-29 v3 Computation Machine Learning

Abstract

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification but is often limited by the challenges of prior and likelihood elicitation. The martingale posterior (MGP) (Fong et al., 2023) offers an alternative by replacing these requirements with a predictive rule. In addition, the MGP focuses inference on parameters defined through a loss function. This framework is especially resonant in the era of foundation transformers; practitioners increasingly leverage models like TabPFN for their state-of-the-art capabilities, yet often require epistemic uncertainty for a scientific estimand θ\theta that need not parameterise the implicit latent model. The MGP provides a mechanism to recover these posterior distributions. We introduce TabMGP, an MGP built on TabPFN for tabular data. TabMGP produces credible sets with near-nominal coverage and often outperforms both handcrafted MGP constructions and standard Bayesian baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.25154,
  title  = {TabMGP: Martingale Posterior with TabPFN},
  author = {Kenyon Ng and Edwin Fong and David T. Frazier and Jeremias Knoblauch and Susan Wei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.25154},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICML 2026. Extra plots in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ct_effOoTEGpiWUf0_1xI3VqLWHtJY16 . Code in https://github.com/weiyaw/tabmgp

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:11:01.827Z