NVIDIA Kumo Relational Outperforms Supervised Machine Learning on Relational Data, No Training Required

NVIDIA Kumo Relational is a pre-trained relational foundation model that makes predictions directly on enterprise databases. Given a predictive query, it gathers up to 10,000 historical examples as context and predicts outcomes such as churn, demand, or fraud in a single forward pass. It needs no task-specific training, no feature engineering, and no flattening of tables. Kumo Relational is the first few-shot foundation model to outperform supervised machine learning on common relational benchmarks. Across 41 tasks on 15 databases, it beats supervised relational deep learning models and expert-engineered gradient-boosted tree pipelines, and on the SAP SALT enterprise benchmark it surpasses AutoGluon ensembles by 8% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR). It scales to databases with 500B+ rows and works for humans and agents alike, through NVIDIA's open-source, GPU-native structured-data-models library or as an NVIDIA NIM.

Foundation models have already rewritten the playbook for language and vision. Not long ago, production NLP meant a dedicated model per task, each fed by its own pipeline of tokenization, lemmatization, and n-grams. LLMs made that stack largely obsolete for three reasons: they were more accurate than the best task-specific models, far simpler to put into production, and flexible enough to open a new era of agentic applications.

The same shift is now underway for structured data. Relational databases power the world's most critical business decisions, yet predictive modeling on them still requires weeks of feature engineering, task-specific training, and tuned pipelines. Structured data foundation models change that for the same three reasons:

![Kumo Relational architecture: (a) context input with task, users, orders and items tables; (b) column and row attention within tables with injected context targets; (c) graph attention and cross-sample attention across tables.]

Figure 2. Kumo Relational architecture: (a) context input, (b) reasoning within tables, (c) reasoning across tables.

Kumo Relational runs in-context learning natively over databases: in memory, through database and warehouse connectors, or through a custom graph engine that handles 500B+ rows via memory-mapped I/O at up to 5 GB/s. It is available in NVIDIA's newly released, GPU-native structured-data-models library, the same open-source library that powers our sister model, Kumo Tabular . The library downloads the weights from the Hugging Face Hub on first use, so you can load the model in a GPU-backed notebook and predict directly from it. The code below passes context examples, prediction entities, and their related tables to the model:

NVIDIA Kumo Relational is available today. Read the research paper , explore the quickstart notebook , or start making predictions on your own data. The code is released under the Apache 2.0 license and the model weights under the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1. NVIDIA believes Trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility, and we have established policies and practices to enable development for a wide array of AI applications. When downloaded or used in accordance with our terms of service, developers should work with their supporting model team to ensure this model meets requirements for the relevant industry and use case and addresses unforeseen product misuse. Please report model quality, risk, security vulnerabilities, or NVIDIA AI concerns here .

Simplicity and agility: One pre-trained model replaces separate pipelines for individual tasks. A new prediction becomes a query instead of a project, so ML teams can finally take on use cases that traditional ML made too laborious to build at every level of the organization.

Most foundation models for structured data operate on a single flat table. Real-world data lives in relational databases instead: users connected to orders connected to products, all evolving over time. Flattening these relationships into one row through manual aggregation ( e.g. , "average order value in the last 30 days") loses fine-grained structural signals and takes significant human effort.

Kumo Relational is a Relational Foundation Model that operates directly on the database, respecting its tables, foreign keys, and timestamps. It is pre-trained once on synthetic relational data that reflects real-world datasets and adapts to each new task through in-context learning , reading up to 10,000 context examples at inference time. Each example pairs a local subgraph around an entity at a point in time with its ground-truth target ( e.g. , "this user churned" or "this item sold 142 units").

Better accuracy today: As drop-in replacements, these models already beat many production pipelines, especially XGBoost. On RelBench V1 classification tasks, Kumo Relational outperforms gradient-boosted trees on expert-engineered features by nearly 4 AUROC points on average. On SAP SALT, it beats XGBoost on engineered features by 7 MRR points out of the box and by 13 MRR points after fine-tuning. These results make a compelling case for replacing production XGBoost pipelines with Kumo Relational.

Agents that can predict: LLMs let agents read, write, and reason. Structured data foundation models let them anticipate what happens next, such as which customer will churn, and act on it. Kumo Relational is already built to be called by agents, and its Predictive Query Language (PQL) gives them a simple interface for asking predictive questions.

Today, we are introducing Kumo Relational ( paper , documentation ), a pre-trained foundation model that brings this paradigm to relational data. Connect a database, describe what to predict, and get predictions in a single forward pass. No training required.