aiLights - XGBoost is Dead: The Silent Revolution of TabularFoundation Models

​For over a decade, the Golden Rule of Data Science has been absolute: Deep Learning is for images and text, but Gradient Boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM) is for tabular data.

​This presentation explores the "silent revolution" of Deep Learning architectures that have finally ended the dominance of Gradient Boosting.
We will move beyond the hype and dive into the architecture of models like TabPFN and Amazon’s Chronos-2, demonstrating how they leverage In-Context Learning (ICL) to outperform tuned XGBoost and LightGBM models on small-to-medium datasets—zero-shot.

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Speaker:
Martin Biehler
Senior Data Scientist Contovista


​​📅 Date & Time: 13.02.2026, 12:00-13:00
⏱️ Duration: 60 minutes
🌐 Language: English
🗣️ Format: Presentation + Q&A
📍 Location: Live on Zoom/YT
👥 Audience: Data Scientists / ML-Engineers / Researchers / interested practitioners

​Turn on the lights! 💡​​

​​​🔗 More information about aiLights: https://ailights.org/
We thank our partner Oertli-Stiftung for the support.