Beyond Distribution Matching: Semantics-Consistent Tabular Diffusion with Weak Semantic Priors

2026-09-13

AI Summary

该研究解决了合成表格数据违反语义约束的问题，通过构建包含列内语义和列间符号规则的弱语义先验，并利用这些先验作为生成条件，提高数据分布保真度和语义一致性。

Abstract

Synthetic tabular data can match real data distributions while still violating the semantic constraints that govern valid tabular rows. This reveals a key limitation of existing tabular generators: they mainly optimize distributional fidelity, but do not explicitly model weak semantic priors encoded in tabular schema and textual descriptions. In this paper, we propose \ours, a semantics-consistent tabular diffusion framework for high-fidelity synthetic data generation under weakly specified semantic priors. \ours\ first constructs two types of priors, namely intra-column semantics and inter-column symbolic rules, with LLM-assisted extraction from metadata and validation on the real training split. These priors are then used as generation conditions rather than post-hoc filters. Specifically, \ours\ maps heterogeneous column values, column identities, and semantic priors into a unified semantic space, and performs column-wise forward corruption and prior-conditioned reverse denoising to preserve both marginal distributions and rule-consistent cross-column dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world tabular benchmarks show that \ours\ consistently improves distributional fidelity, semantic consistency, and downstream task utility over representative VAE-, GAN-, LLM-, and diffusion-based baselines. Additional analyses further demonstrate the robustness of \ours\ when semantic priors are partially unavailable.

Problem

• tabular data
• semantic constraints
• distributional fidelity
• weak semantic priors
• synthetic data

Innovation

• semantics-consistent
• tabular diffusion
• weak semantic priors
• LLM-assisted extraction