Prior Labs & Hitachi Team Up To Advance Predictive Maintenance in Rail Through TabPFN
Berlin and Freiburg, Germany - November 25, 2025
We are proud to be collaborating with Hitachi Rail to bring TabPFN to predictive maintenance workflows across Spain’s railway network.
The Problem with Traditional Predictive Maintenance
Rail infrastructure reliability depends on early detection of anomalies through tracksensors and the ability to prioritize inspections efficiently. Traditional predictive models often require significant feature engineering and manual tuning, which can slow down scale and limit accuracy across varied conditions. In high-stakes environments like rail, this translates to higher inspection loads, slower validation cycles, and operational risk.
40% Improvement in Anomaly Detection
With Prior Labs, Hitachi’s team is applying a foundation model for structured data to identify early signs of track irregularities and support proactive maintenance decisions. In early deployment, TabPFN has demonstrated improvements of roughly 40% in RMSE compared to existing baselines, meaning more precise anomaly detection, earlier warnings, and stronger confidence in maintenance prioritization without increasing the modeling burden on teams.
Operational Impact
For business leaders, better predictive performance supports fewer unnecessary manual inspections, more efficient maintenance planning, and reduced operational overhead. It also helps minimize unexpected downtime and strengthens network reliability for passengers and freight operators.
Beyond model accuracy, this collaboration equips Hitachi with a single modeling system that adapts across diverse data inputs and infrastructure types. Teams cantest, deploy, and iterate faster while maintaining high standards for safety and system performance.
Perspectives from Hitachi and Prior Labs
This partnership reflects a shared commitment to more reliable and automated rail infrastructure and supports safer & more efficient transport networks.
“Hitachi is committed to advancing predictive maintenance across our rail networks.Working with Prior Labs and TabPFN helps us accelerate our use of data for reliability and safety while reducing operational overhead.”
- Isabel Fernando, Innovation Manager, Hitachi Rail
“Railway infrastructure is a mission-critical environment where small improvements create outsized impact on safety and reliability. Hitachi is an incredible partner andadopter of frontier models. Seeing this level of performance lift in real infrastructure workflows demonstrates how foundation models are changing industrial intelligence and enabling teams to act earlier.”
- Sauraj Gambhir, Co-Founder, Prior Labs
