From Uniform to Learned Knots: A Study of Spline-Based Numerical Encodings for Tabular Deep Learning
Numerical preprocessing remains a critical component of tabular deep learning, as the representation of continuous features can strongly affect downstream performance. We systematically study spline-based numerical encodings, including B-splines, M-splines, and integrated splines (I-splines), under uniform, quantile-based, target-aware, and learnable-knot placement. For the learnable variants, we adopt a differentiable knot parameterization that enables stable end-to-end optimization of knot locations jointly with the backbone. We evaluate these encodings on a diverse collection of public regression and classification datasets using MLP, ResNet, and FT-Transformer backbones, and compare t...
| Authors | Manish Kumar, Anton Frederik Thielmann, Christoph Weisser et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.