Tabular foundation models interpolate physics but cannot model it
Tabular foundation models are outperforming traditional baselines on physics-informed datasets, but a new evaluation reveals a critical limitation: they cannot represent deterministic systems or physical units. Researchers tested four leading TFMs against 316 physics equations and found that while these models excel at interpolation within their training distribution, they lack the structural priors needed to function as genuine physics simulators. This gap matters for scientific computing and industrial applications where unit consistency and noiseless mechanisms are non-negotiable, suggesting that scaling tabular models alone won't bridge the gap between statistical pattern matching and causal physical reasoning.62
