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LLM-FE: Automated Feature Engineering for Tabular Data with LLMs as Evolutionary Optimizers

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Automated feature engineering plays a critical role in improving predictive model performance for tabular learning tasks. Traditional automated feature engineering methods are limited by their reliance on pre-defined transformations within fixed, manually designed search spaces, often neglecting domain knowledge. Recent advances using Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the integration of domain knowledge into the feature engineering process. However, existing LLM-based approaches use direct prompting or rely solely on validation scores for feature selection, failing to leverage insights from prior feature discovery experiments or establish meaningful reasoning between feature generation and data-driven performance. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-FE, a novel framework that combines evolutionary search with the domain knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to automatically discover effective features for tabular learning tasks. LLM-FE formulates feature engineering as a program search problem, where LLMs propose new feature transformation programs iteratively, and data-driven feedback guides the search process. Our results demonstrate that LLM-FE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhancing the performance of tabular prediction models across diverse classification and regression benchmarks. The code is available at: https://github.com/nikhilsab/LLMFE

years

2026 4

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 4

representative citing papers

RelAgent: LLM Agents as Data Scientists for Relational Learning

cs.LG · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

RelAgent uses an LLM agent to autonomously generate SQL feature programs paired with classical models for interpretable relational learning predictions that execute efficiently on standard databases.

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