

TAPAS is a model that uses relative position embeddings by default (restarting the position embeddings at every cell of the table). Note that this is something that was added after the publication of the original TAPAS paper. According to the authors, this usually results in a slightly better performance, and allows you to encode longer sequences without running out of embeddings. This is reflected in the reset_position_index_per_cell parameter of [TapasConfig], which is set to True by default. The default versions of the models available on the hub all use relative position embeddings. You can still use the ones with absolute position embeddings by passing in an additional argument revision="no_reset" when calling the from_pretrained() method. Note that it's usually advised to pad the inputs on the right rather than the left.
TAPAS is based on BERT, so TAPAS-base for example corresponds to a BERT-base architecture. Of course, TAPAS-large will result in the best performance (the results reported in the paper are from TAPAS-large). Results of the various sized models are shown on the original GitHub repository.
TAPAS has checkpoints fine-tuned on SQA, which are capable of answering questions related to a table in a conversational set-up. This means that you can ask follow-up questions such as "what is his age?" related to the previous question. Note that the forward pass of TAPAS is a bit different in case of a conversational set-up: in that case, you have to feed every table-question pair one by one to the model, such that the prev_labels token type ids can be overwritten by the predicted labels of the model to the previous question. See "Usage" section for more info.
TAPAS is similar to BERT and therefore relies on the masked language modeling (MLM) objective. It is therefore efficient at predicting masked tokens and at NLU in general, but is not optimal for text generation. Models trained with a causal language modeling (CLM) objective are better in that regard. Note that TAPAS can be used as an encoder in the EncoderDecoderModel framework, to combine it with an autoregressive text decoder such as GPT-2.