google-research / google-research/tabfm

Extracting row embeddings from TabFM for similarity search

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Description

Hi, thanks for releasing TabFM!

I started an experiment today using TabFM as a row embedding model for similarity search over tables: fit on a context table, embed held-out rows, retrieve nearest neighbors by cosine similarity. I'm extracting the output of `row_interactor_2` (2048-d) with a forward hook, and comparing it to TabICL and TabPFN behind one API: https://github.com/vstenby/tfm-embeddings

It's day one and I'm still figuring out if this is a useful direction, so early feedback is welcome. Specific questions:

1. Is `row_interactor_2` where you'd extract a general-purpose row representation? With two column-embed/row-interact stages I wasn't sure if the second stage is more task-specialized and the first might transfer better.
2. Would you consider exposing row representations as a supported API? Happy to contribute if there's interest.

All the best,
Viktor

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start with the row_interactor_2 output and the forward-hook experiment described in the linked tfm-embeddings project. Compare the first and second row-interact stages, then confirm with maintainers whether either representation should become a supported API. No files, tests, or acceptance criteria are named, so the desired public interface and definition of done need clarification.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
28/100

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