AUC

Distilling Tabular Foundation Models for Structured Health Data

This paper investigates knowledge distillation from tabular foundation models (TFMs) to lightweight student models for healthcare applications. The authors address context leakage in in-context TFMs via stratified out-of-fold teacher labeling, evaluating across 19 healthcare datasets, 6 TFM teachers, and 4 student families. Distilled students retain at least 90% of teacher AUC while running 26× faster on CPU, with preserved calibration and fairness properties. Multi-teacher ensembles do not consistently outperform the best single teacher.