@inproceedings{liu-etal-2025-embeddings,
    title = "Embeddings for Numerical Features Using tanh Activation",
    author = "Liu, Bingyan  and
      Elkan, Charles  and
      Hirani, Anil N.",
    editor = "Chang, Shuaichen  and
      Hulsebos, Madelon  and
      Liu, Qian  and
      Chen, Wenhu  and
      Sun, Huan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Table Representation Learning Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.trl-workshop.18/",
    pages = "208--216",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-268-8",
    abstract = "Recent advances in tabular deep learning have demonstrated the importance of embeddings for numerical features, where scalar values are mapped to high-dimensional spaces before being processed by the main model. Here, we propose an embedding method using the hyperbolic tangent (tanh) activation function that allows neural networks to achieve better accuracy on tabular data via an inductive bias similar to that of decision trees. To make training with the new embedding method reliable and efficient, we additionally propose a principled initialization method. Experiments demonstrate that the new approach improves upon or matches accuracy results from previously proposed embedding methods across multiple tabular datasets and model architectures."
}