统计与数据科学系系列学术报告之五百二十八期

时间：2026年11月16日（星期一）15:00-16:00

主持人：复旦大学管理学院统计与数据科学系包亚杰助理教授

地点：史带楼302室

报告人：史成春副教授

伦敦政治经济学院

题目：Can Tabular Foundation Models Amortize Statistical Inference?

摘要：For decades, statistical inference has largely been developed one problem at a time. Given a scientific target, such as a treatment effect or a regression function, statisticians design a problem-specific estimator together with a procedure for quantifying its uncertainty. This paper proposes a different paradigm. We focus on a classical problem in statistical inference, confidence interval construction, and develop TabCon, an amortized inference system built on a tabular foundation model that produces confidence intervals for new datasets through a simple forward pass. The key methodological ingredients of TabCon are a sparse mixture-ofexperts architecture and reinforcement-learning-based post-training that calibrate the resulting confidence intervals to a desired coverage level. Across a wide range of benchmark datasets, TabCon attains near-nominal coverage while producing short confidence intervals. At inference time, it also offers considerably greater computational efficiency, running 50 times faster than the classical bootstrap procedure, even when the latter uses only 50 bootstrap samples.

个人简介：Chengchun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at LSE. He works at the interface of RL, LLMs and statistics, with applications to ride-sharing and healthcare. His work brings to light the relevance and significance of statistical learning in AI, and demonstrates the usefulness of RL as a framework for policy evaluation and A/B testing in two-sided marketplaces. Chengchun has published over 70 papers, with majority of them accepted in prestigious statistical journals (JRSSB, JASA, AoS) and top machine learning venues (NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, JMLR, EMNLP, CVPR, ICLR). His outstanding contributions have been recognized with esteemed awards such as the Peter Gavin Hall IMS Early Career Prize, IMS Tweedie Award and the Royal Statistical Society Research Prize. He has served as the area editor of NeurIPS and associate editors of prestigious journals JRSS-B, JASA and AoAS.