Understanding Context Sampling in TabPFN on Small Tabular Datasets

TabPFN performs classification through in-context learning: it conditions on a set of labeled training rows (the context, or prototypes) and predicts test labels without gradient updates. On small tabular datasets, practitioners must still choose the context size and which rows constitute the context. We study how these choices affect prediction stability, accuracy, and selection cost using repeated context sampling on 15 OpenML datasets. Specifically, we investigate (i) whether larger contexts reduce prediction variability across random draws, (ii) whether accuracy depends on preserving the training distribution or on feature-space coverage, and (iii) whether expensive selection methods ...

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