BiSHop: Bi-Directional Cellular Learning for Tabular Data with Generalized Sparse Modern Hopfield Model

We introduce the $\mathbf{\text{B}}$i-Directional $\mathbf{\text{S}}$parse $\mathbf{\text{Hop}}$field Network ($\mathbf{\text{BiSHop}}$), a novel end-to-end framework for deep tabular learning. BiSHop handles the two major challenges of deep tabular learning: non-rotationally invariant data structure and feature sparsity in tabular data. Our key motivation comes from the recent established connection between associative memory and attention mechanisms. Consequently, BiSHop uses a dual-component approach, sequentially processing data both column-wise and row-wise through two interconnected directional learning modules. Computationally, these modules house layers of generalized sparse modern Hopfield layers, a sparse extension of the modern Hopfield model with adaptable sparsity. Methodologically, BiSHop facilitates multi-scale representation learning, capturing both intra-feature and inter-feature interactions, with adaptive sparsity at each scale. Empirically, through experiments on diverse real-world datasets, we demonstrate that BiSHop surpasses current SOTA methods with significantly less HPO runs, marking it a robust solution for deep tabular learning.