TL;DR for operators Many tabular foundation models behave like very competent consultants with a mildly expensive habit: they want the entire labelled training set placed in front of them at inference time. That works neatly on small datasets. It becomes rather less charming when the table grows to tens or hundreds of thousands of rows and the model’s attention cost starts behaving like it has discovered compound interest. ...
Search is not judgment Search is easy to admire because it produces something visible. A ranked list. A bigger context window. A satisfying pile of passages that says, “Look, we retrieved evidence.” Very comforting. Also not the same as knowing what evidence is actually needed. That distinction is the core of Context-Picker: Dynamic Context Selection Using Multi-stage Reinforcement Learning.1 The paper studies a familiar RAG problem: if a system retrieves too little, it misses the answer; if it retrieves too much, it drags in distractors, repeats, weakly related fragments, and the usual long-context swamp where useful evidence politely disappears in the middle. ...