English

RDBLearn: Simple In-Context Prediction Over Relational Databases

Databases 2026-02-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent advances in tabular in-context learning (ICL) show that a single pretrained model can adapt to new prediction tasks from a small set of labeled examples, avoiding per-task training and heavy tuning. However, many real-world tasks live in relational databases, where predictive signal is spread across multiple linked tables rather than a single flat table. We show that tabular ICL can be extended to relational prediction with a simple recipe: automatically featurize each target row using relational aggregations over its linked records, materialize the resulting augmented table, and run an off-the-shelf tabular foundation model on it. We package this approach in \textit{RDBLearn} (https://github.com/HKUSHXLab/rdblearn), an easy-to-use toolkit with a scikit-learn-style estimator interface that makes it straightforward to swap different tabular ICL backends; a complementary agent-specific interface is provided as well. Across a broad collection of RelBench and 4DBInfer datasets, RDBLearn is the best-performing foundation model approach we evaluate, at times even outperforming strong supervised baselines trained or fine-tuned on each dataset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18495,
  title  = {RDBLearn: Simple In-Context Prediction Over Relational Databases},
  author = {Yanlin Zhang and Linjie Xu and Quan Gan and David Wipf and Minjie Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18495},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:45:07.308Z