CDMD: A Cross-Dataset Mixed-Type Diffusion Model for Tabular Data

Abstract

Generative models for tabular data are typically trained separately for each dataset, limiting knowledge transfer and requiring the storage of many specialized models. In this paper, we introduce CDMD, a tabular diffusion model trained jointly across heterogeneous datasets with different schemas and variable numbers of numerical and categorical features. Unlike existing cross-dataset tabular diffusion models that operate in continuous representation spaces, CDMD defines diffusion directly over the mixed-type feature space and is trained end-to-end. To accommodate heterogeneous categorical domains, we introduce a schema-restricted reverse-process parameterization for masked diffusion models, in which the output space dynamically adapts to each feature's vocabulary. We then compose numerical and categorical feature-level diffusion processes into a schema-dependent row-level process. A shared schema-aware Transformer denoiser captures dependencies between features and parameterizes the reverse process across varying schemas. On seven real-world datasets, a single jointly trained CDMD achieves the highest average generation quality among strong single-dataset and cross-dataset baselines, while using substantially fewer total parameters than the collection of separately trained models. Furthermore, pre-training on a corpus of 337 datasets improves generation on previously unseen datasets under both limited target data and limited adaptation epochs. These results demonstrate the potential of direct mixed-type diffusion for shared and transferable tabular data generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ketatam/cdmd.