KMLP: A Scalable Hybrid Architecture for Web-Scale Tabular Data Modeling

Predictive modeling on web-scale tabular data presents significant scalability challenges for industrial applications, often involving billions of instances and hundreds of heterogeneous numerical features. The inherent complexities of these features—characterized by anisotropy, heavy-tailed distributions, and non-stationarity—not only impose bottlenecks on the training efficiency and scalability of mainstream models like Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs), but also compel practitioners into laborious, inefficient, and expert-dependent manual feature engineering. To systematically address this challenge, we introduce KMLP, a novel hybrid deep architecture. KMLP synergistically integrates a shallow Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) as a front-end with a Gated Multilayer Perceptron (gMLP) as the backbone. The KAN front-end leverages its learnable activation functions to automatically model complex non-linear transformations for each input feature in an end-to-end manner, thereby automating feature representation learning. Subsequently, the gMLP backbone efficiently captures high-order interactions among these refined representations. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks and an ultra-large-scale industrial web dataset with billions of samples demonstrate that KMLP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Crucially, our findings reveal that KMLP's performance advantage over strong baselines like GBDTs becomes more pronounced as the data scale increases. This validates KMLP as a scalable and adaptive deep learning paradigm, offering a promising path forward for modeling large-scale, dynamic web tabular data.