Tabular data presents unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous nature, where numeric features exhibit diverse distributions, scales, and statistical properties. Although recent advances have improved how models learn from tabular data, how numeric data are transformed into model-friendly representations remains comparatively underexplored. We introduce the stretch transformation framework, which formulates numeric feature preprocessing as an optimization problem to make the target function smoother and thus more learnable. Our framework has two variants: (1) unsupervised stretch, which uniformly redistributes feature density via minimax optimization, and (2) supervised stretch, which optimizes target-aware numeric feature transformations from the perspective of target-function smoothness by minimizing the target function's Dirichlet energy in the transformed space. Our theoretical analysis further connects this framework to several popular transformations: unsupervised stretch is closely related to Piecewise Linear Encoding through a shared piecewise-linear geometry and approaches the empirical CDF transformation as the number of bins grows, while supervised stretch becomes closely related to target encoding in the fine-binning limit. Comprehensive experiments on 38 datasets from the TALENT benchmark demonstrate that supervised stretch consistently outperforms all baselines. These results show that explicitly optimizing for target function smoothness is a powerful and underexplored strategy for tabular deep learning.
Zihao Ye, Juyong Kim, Johnna Sundberg et al.· 0 citations
Long-term ship trajectory prediction is a fundamental capability for maritime safety and autonomous navigation. While recent Transformer-based architectures have improved forecasting horizons, they predominantly rely on historical kinematic states, treating vessel motion as an isolated system. In reality, maritime navigation is profoundly modulated by extrinsic factors like weather and constrained by static vessel characteristics. Existing multimodal approaches fundamentally model the joint distribution over states and contexts, treating environmental variables as peer features rather than encoding the directional physical dependence of vessel dynamics on environmental conditions. In this work, we propose the Conditional Informer, a novel encoder-decoder architecture that formulates trajectory prediction as a conditional generation task. We employ a dedicated Conditional Attention mechanism where the vessel state explicitly queries environmental contexts through cross-attention, encoding the physical prior that weather modulates - but is not generated by - vessel dynamics. Furthermore, to address the intermittency of real-world data, we introduce a Modality Masking training strategy to prevent catastrophic degradation during sensor fallback. Extensive experiments on AIS and ERA5 data demonstrate that our approach outperforms kinematic and concatenation-based baselines by 15.4% in prediction accuracy when context is available. Crucially, Modality Masking prevents shortcut learning, reducing fallback error by nearly an order of magnitude compared to unconstrained models.
Yuansheng Guan, C. Squires, Timothy Hu et al.· 0 citations
