Daily Papers

Existing table understanding methods face challenges due to complex table structures and intricate logical reasoning. While supervised finetuning (SFT) dominates existing research, reinforcement learning (RL), such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown promise but struggled with low initial policy accuracy and coarse rewards in tabular contexts. In this paper, we introduce Table-R1, a three-stage RL framework that enhances multimodal table understanding through: (1) Warm-up that prompts initial perception and reasoning capabilities, (2) Perception Alignment GRPO (PA-GRPO), which employs continuous Tree-Edit-Distance Similarity (TEDS) rewards for recognizing table structures and contents, and (3) Hint-Completion GRPO (HC-GRPO), which utilizes fine-grained rewards of residual steps based on the hint-guided question. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Table-R1 can boost the model's table reasoning performance obviously on both held-in and held-out datasets, outperforming SFT and GRPO largely. Notably, Qwen2-VL-7B with Table-R1 surpasses larger specific table understanding models (e.g., Table-LLaVA 13B), even achieving comparable performance to the closed-source model GPT-4o on held-in datasets, demonstrating the efficacy of each stage of Table-R1 in overcoming initialization bottlenecks and reward sparsity, thereby advancing robust multimodal table understanding.

Reasoning over tabular data requires both table structure understanding and a broad set of table reasoning skills. Current models with table-specific architectures and pre-training methods perform well on understanding table structures, but they still struggle with tasks that require various table reasoning skills. In this work, we develop ReasTAP to show that high-level table reasoning skills can be injected into models during pre-training without a complex table-specific architecture design. We define 7 table reasoning skills, such as numerical operation, temporal comparison, and conjunction. Each reasoning skill is associated with one example generator, which synthesizes questions over semi-structured tables according to the sampled templates. We model the table pre-training task as a sequence generation task and pre-train ReasTAP to generate precise answers to the synthetic examples. ReasTAP is evaluated on four benchmarks covering three downstream tasks including: 1) WikiSQL and WTQ for Table Question Answering; 2) TabFact for Table Fact Verification; and 3) LogicNLG for Faithful Table-to-Text Generation. Experimental results demonstrate that ReasTAP achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks and delivers a significant improvement on low-resource setting. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/ReasTAP.

Recent deep learning approaches in table detection achieved outstanding performance and proved to be effective in identifying document layouts. Currently, available table detection benchmarks have many limitations, including the lack of samples diversity, simple table structure, the lack of training cases, and samples quality. In this paper, we introduce a diverse large-scale dataset for table detection with more than seven thousand samples containing a wide variety of table structures collected from many diverse sources. In addition to that, we also present baseline results using a convolutional neural network-based method to detect table structure in documents. Experimental results show the superiority of applying convolutional deep learning methods over classical computer vision-based methods. The introduction of this diverse table detection dataset will enable the community to develop high throughput deep learning methods for understanding document layout and tabular data processing.

All tables can be represented as grids. Based on this observation, we propose GridFormer, a novel approach for interpreting unconstrained table structures by predicting the vertex and edge of a grid. First, we propose a flexible table representation in the form of an MXN grid. In this representation, the vertexes and edges of the grid store the localization and adjacency information of the table. Then, we introduce a DETR-style table structure recognizer to efficiently predict this multi-objective information of the grid in a single shot. Specifically, given a set of learned row and column queries, the recognizer directly outputs the vertexes and edges information of the corresponding rows and columns. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks which include wired, wireless, multi-merge-cell, oriented, and distorted tables demonstrate the competitive performance of our model over other methods.

Extracting tables from documents is a crucial task in any document conversion pipeline. Recently, transformer-based models have demonstrated that table-structure can be recognized with impressive accuracy using Image-to-Markup-Sequence (Im2Seq) approaches. Taking only the image of a table, such models predict a sequence of tokens (e.g. in HTML, LaTeX) which represent the structure of the table. Since the token representation of the table structure has a significant impact on the accuracy and run-time performance of any Im2Seq model, we investigate in this paper how table-structure representation can be optimised. We propose a new, optimised table-structure language (OTSL) with a minimized vocabulary and specific rules. The benefits of OTSL are that it reduces the number of tokens to 5 (HTML needs 28+) and shortens the sequence length to half of HTML on average. Consequently, model accuracy improves significantly, inference time is halved compared to HTML-based models, and the predicted table structures are always syntactically correct. This in turn eliminates most post-processing needs.

Spreadsheet table detection is the task of detecting all tables on a given sheet and locating their respective ranges. Automatic table detection is a key enabling technique and an initial step in spreadsheet data intelligence. However, the detection task is challenged by the diversity of table structures and table layouts on the spreadsheet. Considering the analogy between a cell matrix as spreadsheet and a pixel matrix as image, and encouraged by the successful application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in computer vision, we have developed TableSense, a novel end-to-end framework for spreadsheet table detection. First, we devise an effective cell featurization scheme to better leverage the rich information in each cell; second, we develop an enhanced convolutional neural network model for table detection to meet the domain-specific requirement on precise table boundary detection; third, we propose an effective uncertainty metric to guide an active learning based smart sampling algorithm, which enables the efficient build-up of a training dataset with 22,176 tables on 10,220 sheets with broad coverage of diverse table structures and layouts. Our evaluation shows that TableSense is highly effective with 91.3\% recall and 86.5\% precision in EoB-2 metric, a significant improvement over both the current detection algorithm that are used in commodity spreadsheet tools and state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks in computer vision.

Recently, significant progress has been made applying machine learning to the problem of table structure inference and extraction from unstructured documents. However, one of the greatest challenges remains the creation of datasets with complete, unambiguous ground truth at scale. To address this, we develop a new, more comprehensive dataset for table extraction, called PubTables-1M. PubTables-1M contains nearly one million tables from scientific articles, supports multiple input modalities, and contains detailed header and location information for table structures, making it useful for a wide variety of modeling approaches. It also addresses a significant source of ground truth inconsistency observed in prior datasets called oversegmentation, using a novel canonicalization procedure. We demonstrate that these improvements lead to a significant increase in training performance and a more reliable estimate of model performance at evaluation for table structure recognition. Further, we show that transformer-based object detection models trained on PubTables-1M produce excellent results for all three tasks of detection, structure recognition, and functional analysis without the need for any special customization for these tasks. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer.

Understanding tables is an important aspect of natural language understanding. Existing models for table understanding require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. Such spurious biases make the model vulnerable to row and column order perturbations. Additionally, prior work has not thoroughly modeled the table structures or table-text alignments, hindering the table-text understanding ability. In this work, we propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer, where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biases. TableFormer is (1) strictly invariant to row and column orders, and, (2) could understand tables better due to its tabular inductive biases. Our evaluations showed that TableFormer outperforms strong baselines in all settings on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQA, especially when facing answer-invariant row and column order perturbations (6% improvement over the best baseline), because previous SOTA models' performance drops by 4% - 6% when facing such perturbations while TableFormer is not affected.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked great opportunities in complex data management tasks, particularly in question answering (QA) over complicated multi-table relational data. Despite significant progress, systematically evaluating LLMs on multi-table QA remains a critical challenge due to the inherent complexity of analyzing heterogeneous table structures and potential large scale of serialized relational data. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-table QA, failing to capture the intricacies of reasoning across multiple relational tables, as required in real-world domains such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. To address this gap, we present TQA-Bench, a new multi-table QA benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in tackling complex QA tasks over relational data. Our benchmark incorporates diverse relational database instances sourced from real-world public datasets and introduces a flexible sampling mechanism to create tasks with varying multi-table context lengths, ranging from 8K to 64K tokens. To ensure robustness and reliability, we integrate symbolic extensions into the evaluation framework, enabling the assessment of LLM reasoning capabilities beyond simple data retrieval or probabilistic pattern matching. We systematically evaluate a range of LLMs, both open-source and closed-source, spanning model scales from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Our extensive experiments reveal critical insights into the performance of LLMs in multi-table QA, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for advancing their application in complex, data-driven environments. Our benchmark implementation and results are available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/TQA-Bench.

Integrating structured knowledge from tabular formats poses significant challenges within natural language processing (NLP), mainly when dealing with complex, semi-structured tables like those found in the FeTaQA dataset. These tables require advanced methods to interpret and generate meaningful responses accurately. Traditional approaches, such as SQL and SPARQL, often fail to fully capture the semantics of such data, especially in the presence of irregular table structures like web tables. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel approach that extracts triples straightforward from tabular data and integrates it with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to enhance the accuracy, coherence, and contextual richness of responses generated by a fine-tuned GPT-3.5-turbo-0125 model. Our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on the FeTaQA dataset, particularly excelling in Sacre-BLEU and ROUGE metrics. It effectively generates contextually accurate and detailed long-form answers from tables, showcasing its strength in complex data interpretation.

Recent literature has shown that large language models (LLMs) are generally excellent few-shot reasoners to solve text reasoning tasks. However, the capability of LLMs on table reasoning tasks is yet to be explored. In this paper, we aim at understanding how well LLMs can perform table-related tasks with few-shot in-context learning. Specifically, we evaluated LLMs on popular table QA and fact verification datasets like WikiTableQuestion, FetaQA, TabFact, and FEVEROUS and found that LLMs are competent at complex reasoning over table structures, though these models are not pre-trained on any table corpus. When combined with `chain of thoughts' prompting, LLMs can achieve very strong performance with only a 1-shot demonstration, even on par with some SoTA models. We show that LLMs are even more competent at generating comprehensive long-form answers on FetaQA than tuned T5-large. We further manually studied the reasoning chains elicited from LLMs and found that these reasoning chains are highly consistent with the underlying semantic form. We believe that LLMs can serve as a simple yet generic baseline for future research. The code and data are released in https://github.com/wenhuchen/TableCoT.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for challenging benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities in handling complex tabular data. However, existing benchmarks are either based on outdated data setups or focus solely on simple, flat table structures. In this paper, we introduce RealHiTBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of both LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. RealHiTBench also includes a diverse collection of tables with intricate structures, spanning a wide range of task types. Our experimental results, using 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrate that RealHiTBench is indeed a challenging benchmark. Moreover, we also develop TreeThinker, a tree-based pipeline that organizes hierarchical headers into a tree structure for enhanced tabular reasoning, validating the importance of improving LLMs' perception of table hierarchies. We hope that our work will inspire further research on tabular data reasoning and the development of more robust models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cspzyy/RealHiTBench.

With recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and growing interest in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the ability to understand table structures has become increasingly important. This is especially critical in financial domains such as securities reports, where highly accurate question answering (QA) over tables is required. However, tables exist in various formats-including HTML, images, and plain text-making it difficult to preserve and extract structural information. Therefore, multimodal LLMs are essential for robust and general-purpose table understanding. Despite their promise, current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which are major representatives of multimodal LLMs, still face challenges in accurately understanding characters and their spatial relationships within documents. In this study, we propose a method to enhance LVLM-based table understanding by incorporating in-table textual content and layout features. Experimental results demonstrate that these auxiliary modalities significantly improve performance, enabling robust interpretation of complex document layouts without relying on explicitly structured input formats.

LLMs have shown impressive progress in natural language processing. However, they still face significant challenges in TableQA, where real-world complexities such as diverse table structures, multilingual data, and domain-specific reasoning are crucial. Existing TableQA benchmarks are often limited by their focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage. Furthermore, most benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture the cross-lingual and cross-domain variability in practical applications. To address these limitations, we introduce TableEval, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on realistic TableQA tasks. Specifically, TableEval includes tables with various structures (such as concise, hierarchical, and nested tables) collected from four domains (including government, finance, academia, and industry reports). Besides, TableEval features cross-lingual scenarios with tables in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. To minimize the risk of data leakage, we collect all data from recent real-world documents. Considering that existing TableQA metrics fail to capture semantic accuracy, we further propose SEAT, a new evaluation framework that assesses the alignment between model responses and reference answers at the sub-question level. Experimental results have shown that SEAT achieves high agreement with human judgment. Extensive experiments on TableEval reveal critical gaps in the ability of state-of-the-art LLMs to handle these complex, real-world TableQA tasks, offering insights for future improvements. We make our dataset available here: https://github.com/wenge-research/TableEval.

Document parsing is a core task in document intelligence, supporting applications such as information extraction, retrieval-augmented generation, and automated document analysis. However, real-world documents often feature complex layouts with multi-level tables, embedded images or formulas, and cross-page structures, which remain challenging for existing OCR systems. We introduce MonkeyOCR v1.5, a unified vision-language framework that enhances both layout understanding and content recognition through a two-stage parsing pipeline. The first stage employs a large multimodal model to jointly predict document layout and reading order, leveraging visual information to ensure structural and sequential consistency. The second stage performs localized recognition of text, formulas, and tables within detected regions, maintaining high visual fidelity while reducing error propagation. To address complex table structures, we propose a visual consistency-based reinforcement learning scheme that evaluates recognition quality via render-and-compare alignment, improving structural accuracy without manual annotations. Additionally, two specialized modules, Image-Decoupled Table Parsing and Type-Guided Table Merging, are introduced to enable reliable parsing of tables containing embedded images and reconstruction of tables crossing pages or columns. Comprehensive experiments on OmniDocBench v1.5 demonstrate that MonkeyOCR v1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming PPOCR-VL and MinerU 2.5 while showing exceptional robustness in visually complex document scenarios.

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) is vital for various downstream tasks like information retrieval, table reconstruction, and document understanding. While most state-of-the-art (SOTA) research predominantly focuses on TSR in English documents, the need for similar capabilities in other languages is evident, considering the global diversity of data. Moreover, creating substantial labeled data in non-English languages and training these SOTA models from scratch is costly and time-consuming. We propose TSR as a language-agnostic cell arrangement prediction and introduce SPRINT, Script-agnostic Structure Recognition in Tables. SPRINT uses recently introduced Optimized Table Structure Language (OTSL) sequences to predict table structures. We show that when coupled with a pre-trained table grid estimator, SPRINT can improve the overall tree edit distance-based similarity structure scores of tables even for non-English documents. We experimentally evaluate our performance across benchmark TSR datasets including PubTabNet, FinTabNet, and PubTables-1M. Our findings reveal that SPRINT not only matches SOTA models in performance on standard datasets but also demonstrates lower latency. Additionally, SPRINT excels in accurately identifying table structures in non-English documents, surpassing current leading models by showing an absolute average increase of 11.12%. We also present an algorithm for converting valid OTSL predictions into a widely used HTML-based table representation. To encourage further research, we release our code and Multilingual Scanned and Scene Table Structure Recognition Dataset, MUSTARD labeled with OTSL sequences for 1428 tables in thirteen languages encompassing several scripts at https://github.com/IITB-LEAP-OCR/SPRINT

We focus on the cross-domain context-dependent text-to-SQL generation task. Based on the observation that adjacent natural language questions are often linguistically dependent and their corresponding SQL queries tend to overlap, we utilize the interaction history by editing the previous predicted query to improve the generation quality. Our editing mechanism views SQL as sequences and reuses generation results at the token level in a simple manner. It is flexible to change individual tokens and robust to error propagation. Furthermore, to deal with complex table structures in different domains, we employ an utterance-table encoder and a table-aware decoder to incorporate the context of the user utterance and the table schema. We evaluate our approach on the SParC dataset and demonstrate the benefit of editing compared with the state-of-the-art baselines which generate SQL from scratch. Our code is available at https://github.com/ryanzhumich/sparc_atis_pytorch.

Language models pretrained on large collections of tabular data have demonstrated their effectiveness in several downstream tasks. However, many of these models do not take into account the row/column permutation invariances, hierarchical structure, etc. that exist in tabular data. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HYTREL, a tabular language model, that captures the permutation invariances and three more structural properties of tabular data by using hypergraphs - where the table cells make up the nodes and the cells occurring jointly together in each row, column, and the entire table are used to form three different types of hyperedges. We show that HYTREL is maximally invariant under certain conditions for tabular data, i.e., two tables obtain the same representations via HYTREL iff the two tables are identical up to permutations. Our empirical results demonstrate that HYTREL consistently outperforms other competitive baselines on four downstream tasks with minimal pretraining, illustrating the advantages of incorporating the inductive biases associated with tabular data into the representations. Finally, our qualitative analyses showcase that HYTREL can assimilate the table structures to generate robust representations for the cells, rows, columns, and the entire table.

Tabular data (or tables) are the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). However, ML models often assume the table structure keeps fixed in training and testing. Before ML modeling, heavy data cleaning is required to merge disparate tables with different columns. This preprocessing often incurs significant data waste (e.g., removing unmatched columns and samples). How to learn ML models from multiple tables with partially overlapping columns? How to incrementally update ML models as more columns become available over time? Can we leverage model pretraining on multiple distinct tables? How to train an ML model which can predict on an unseen table? To answer all those questions, we propose to relax fixed table structures by introducing a Transferable Tabular Transformer (TransTab) for tables. The goal of TransTab is to convert each sample (a row in the table) to a generalizable embedding vector, and then apply stacked transformers for feature encoding. One methodology insight is combining column description and table cells as the raw input to a gated transformer model. The other insight is to introduce supervised and self-supervised pretraining to improve model performance. We compare TransTab with multiple baseline methods on diverse benchmark datasets and five oncology clinical trial datasets. Overall, TransTab ranks 1.00, 1.00, 1.78 out of 12 methods in supervised learning, feature incremental learning, and transfer learning scenarios, respectively; and the proposed pretraining leads to 2.3% AUC lift on average over the supervised learning.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been shown to improve knowledge capabilities and alleviate the hallucination problem of LLMs. The Web is a major source of external knowledge used in RAG systems, and many commercial systems such as ChatGPT and Perplexity have used Web search engines as their major retrieval systems. Typically, such RAG systems retrieve search results, download HTML sources of the results, and then extract plain texts from the HTML sources. Plain text documents or chunks are fed into the LLMs to augment the generation. However, much of the structural and semantic information inherent in HTML, such as headings and table structures, is lost during this plain-text-based RAG process. To alleviate this problem, we propose HtmlRAG, which uses HTML instead of plain text as the format of retrieved knowledge in RAG. We believe HTML is better than plain text in modeling knowledge in external documents, and most LLMs possess robust capacities to understand HTML. However, utilizing HTML presents new challenges. HTML contains additional content such as tags, JavaScript, and CSS specifications, which bring extra input tokens and noise to the RAG system. To address this issue, we propose HTML cleaning, compression, and pruning strategies, to shorten the HTML while minimizing the loss of information. Specifically, we design a two-step block-tree-based pruning method that prunes useless HTML blocks and keeps only the relevant part of the HTML. Experiments on six QA datasets confirm the superiority of using HTML in RAG systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive language/vision reasoning abilities, igniting the recent trend of building agents for targeted applications such as shopping assistants or AI software engineers. Recently, many data science benchmarks have been proposed to investigate their performance in the data science domain. However, existing data science benchmarks still fall short when compared to real-world data science applications due to their simplified settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce DSBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate data science agents with realistic tasks. This benchmark includes 466 data analysis tasks and 74 data modeling tasks, sourced from Eloquence and Kaggle competitions. DSBench offers a realistic setting by encompassing long contexts, multimodal task backgrounds, reasoning with large data files and multi-table structures, and performing end-to-end data modeling tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, LVLMs, and agents shows that they struggle with most tasks, with the best agent solving only 34.12% of data analysis tasks and achieving a 34.74% Relative Performance Gap (RPG). These findings underscore the need for further advancements in developing more practical, intelligent, and autonomous data science agents.

Tables have gained significant attention in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their complex and flexible structure. Unlike linear text inputs, tables are two-dimensional, encompassing formats that range from well-structured database tables to complex, multi-layered spreadsheets, each with different purposes. This diversity in format and purpose has led to the development of specialized methods and tasks, instead of universal approaches, making navigation of table understanding tasks challenging. To address these challenges, this paper introduces key concepts through a taxonomy of tabular input representations and an introduction of table understanding tasks. We highlight several critical gaps in the field that indicate the need for further research: (1) the predominance of retrieval-focused tasks that require minimal reasoning beyond mathematical and logical operations; (2) significant challenges faced by models when processing complex table structures, large-scale tables, length context, or multi-table scenarios; and (3) the limited generalization of models across different tabular representations and formats.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based large language models (LLMs) are widely used in finance for their excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, standardized documents (e.g., SEC filing) share similar formats such as repetitive boilerplate texts, and similar table structures. This similarity forces traditional RAG methods to misidentify near-duplicate text, leading to duplicate retrieval that undermines accuracy and completeness. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Retrieval with Evidence Curation (HiREC) framework. Our approach first performs hierarchical retrieval to reduce confusion among similar texts. It first retrieve related documents and then selects the most relevant passages from the documents. The evidence curation process removes irrelevant passages. When necessary, it automatically generates complementary queries to collect missing information. To evaluate our approach, we construct and release a Large-scale Open-domain Financial (LOFin) question answering benchmark that includes 145,897 SEC documents and 1,595 question-answer pairs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/deep-over/LOFin-bench-HiREC.

Recent advancements in NLP have witnessed the groundbreaking impact of pretrained models, yielding impressive outcomes across various tasks. This study seeks to extend the power of pretraining methodologies to facilitating the prediction over tables in data science, a domain traditionally overlooked, yet inherently challenging due to the plethora of table schemas intrinsic to different tasks. The primary research questions underpinning this work revolve around the establishment of a universal pretraining protocol for tables with varied structures, the generalizability and transferability of learned knowledge across tasks, the adaptation to diverse downstream applications, and the incorporation of incremental columns over time. In response to these challenges, we introduce UniTabE, a straightforward yet effective method designed to process tables in a uniform manner, devoid of constraints imposed by specific table structures. UniTabE's core concept relies on representing each basic table element with a module, termed TabUnit. This is subsequently followed by a Transformer encoder to refine the representation. Moreover, our model is designed to facilitate pretraining and finetuning through the utilization of free-form prompts. In order to implement the pretraining phase, we curated an expansive tabular dataset comprising approximately 13B samples, meticulously gathered from the Kaggle platform. This research primarily centers on classification and regression tasks involving tabular data, and conducts rigorous experimental testing and analyses to validate the effectiveness of our methodology. The experimental results demonstrate UniTabE's superior performance against several baselines across massive benchmarks. This, therefore, underscores UniTabE's potential to significantly enhance the semantic representation of tabular data, thereby marking a significant stride for tabular data analysis.

Tables are widely used in documents because of their compact and structured representation of information. In particular, in scientific papers, tables can sum up novel discoveries and summarize experimental results, making the research comparable and easily understandable by scholars. Since the layout of tables is highly variable, it would be useful to interpret their content and classify them into categories. This could be helpful to directly extract information from scientific papers, for instance comparing performance of some models given their paper result tables. In this work, we address the classification of tables using a Graph Neural Network, exploiting the table structure for the message passing algorithm in use. We evaluate our model on a subset of the Tab2Know dataset. Since it contains few examples manually annotated, we propose data augmentation techniques directly on the table graph structures. We achieve promising preliminary results, proposing a data augmentation method suitable for graph-based table representation.

We extend neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to dynamic large-scale urban scenes. Prior work tends to reconstruct single video clips of short durations (up to 10 seconds). Two reasons are that such methods (a) tend to scale linearly with the number of moving objects and input videos because a separate model is built for each and (b) tend to require supervision via 3D bounding boxes and panoptic labels, obtained manually or via category-specific models. As a step towards truly open-world reconstructions of dynamic cities, we introduce two key innovations: (a) we factorize the scene into three separate hash table data structures to efficiently encode static, dynamic, and far-field radiance fields, and (b) we make use of unlabeled target signals consisting of RGB images, sparse LiDAR, off-the-shelf self-supervised 2D descriptors, and most importantly, 2D optical flow. Operationalizing such inputs via photometric, geometric, and feature-metric reconstruction losses enables SUDS to decompose dynamic scenes into the static background, individual objects, and their motions. When combined with our multi-branch table representation, such reconstructions can be scaled to tens of thousands of objects across 1.2 million frames from 1700 videos spanning geospatial footprints of hundreds of kilometers, (to our knowledge) the largest dynamic NeRF built to date. We present qualitative initial results on a variety of tasks enabled by our representations, including novel-view synthesis of dynamic urban scenes, unsupervised 3D instance segmentation, and unsupervised 3D cuboid detection. To compare to prior work, we also evaluate on KITTI and Virtual KITTI 2, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on ground truth 3D bounding box annotations while being 10x quicker to train.

Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.

Tables contain factual and quantitative data accompanied by various structures and contents that pose challenges for machine comprehension. Previous methods generally design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, resulting in modal isolation and intricate workflows. In this paper, we present a novel large vision-language model, TabPedia, equipped with a concept synergy mechanism. In this mechanism, all the involved diverse visual table understanding (VTU) tasks and multi-source visual embeddings are abstracted as concepts. This unified framework allows TabPedia to seamlessly integrate VTU tasks, such as table detection, table structure recognition, table querying, and table question answering, by leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the concept synergy mechanism enables table perception-related and comprehension-related tasks to work in harmony, as they can effectively leverage the needed clues from the corresponding source perception embeddings. Furthermore, to better evaluate the VTU task in real-world scenarios, we establish a new and comprehensive table VQA benchmark, ComTQA, featuring approximately 9,000 QA pairs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both table perception and comprehension tasks, conducted across various public benchmarks, validate the effectiveness of our TabPedia. The superior performance further confirms the feasibility of using LLMs for understanding visual tables when all concepts work in synergy. The benchmark ComTQA has been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/ComTQA. The source code and model will be released later.

Tabular data, as a crucial form of data representation, exists in diverse formats on the Web. When confronted with complex and irregular tables, manual modification becomes a laborious task. This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of table editing tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on regular-shaped tables, wherein instructions are used to generate code in SQL, Python, or Excel Office-script for manipulating the tables. Nevertheless, editing tables with irregular structures, particularly those containing merged cells spanning multiple rows, poses a challenge when using code. To address this, we introduce the WikiTableEdit dataset. Leveraging 26,531 tables from the WikiSQL dataset, we automatically generate natural language instructions for six distinct basic operations and the corresponding outcomes, resulting in over 200,000 instances. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative large language models on the WikiTableEdit dataset to demonstrate the challenge of this task. The dataset will be released to the community to promote related researches.

Logic synthesis, a critical stage in electronic design automation (EDA), optimizes gate-level circuits to minimize power consumption and area occupancy in integrated circuits (ICs). Traditional logic synthesis tools rely on human-designed heuristics, often yielding suboptimal results. Although differentiable architecture search (DAS) has shown promise in generating circuits from truth tables, it faces challenges such as high computational complexity, convergence to local optima, and extensive hyperparameter tuning. Consequently, we propose a novel approach integrating conditional generative models with DAS for circuit generation. Our approach first introduces CircuitVQ, a circuit tokenizer trained based on our Circuit AutoEncoder We then develop CircuitAR, a masked autoregressive model leveraging CircuitVQ as the tokenizer. CircuitAR can generate preliminary circuit structures from truth tables, which guide DAS in producing functionally equivalent circuits. Notably, we observe the scalability and emergent capability in generating complex circuit structures of our CircuitAR models. Extensive experiments also show the superior performance of our method. This research bridges the gap between probabilistic generative models and precise circuit generation, offering a robust solution for logic synthesis.

We present a new table structure recognition (TSR) approach, called TSRFormer, to robustly recognizing the structures of complex tables with geometrical distortions from various table images. Unlike previous methods, we formulate table separation line prediction as a line regression problem instead of an image segmentation problem and propose a new two-stage DETR based separator prediction approach, dubbed Separator REgression TRansformer (SepRETR), to predict separation lines from table images directly. To make the two-stage DETR framework work efficiently and effectively for the separation line prediction task, we propose two improvements: 1) A prior-enhanced matching strategy to solve the slow convergence issue of DETR; 2) A new cross attention module to sample features from a high-resolution convolutional feature map directly so that high localization accuracy is achieved with low computational cost. After separation line prediction, a simple relation network based cell merging module is used to recover spanning cells. With these new techniques, our TSRFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets, including SciTSR, PubTabNet and WTW. Furthermore, we have validated the robustness of our approach to tables with complex structures, borderless cells, large blank spaces, empty or spanning cells as well as distorted or even curved shapes on a more challenging real-world in-house dataset.

The automated analysis of chemical literature holds promise to accelerate discovery in fields such as material science and drug development. In particular, search capabilities for chemical structures and Markush structures (chemical structure templates) within patent documents are valuable, e.g., for prior-art search. Advancements have been made in the automatic extraction of chemical structures from text and images, yet the Markush structures remain largely unexplored due to their complex multi-modal nature. In this work, we present MarkushGrapher, a multi-modal approach for recognizing Markush structures in documents. Our method jointly encodes text, image, and layout information through a Vision-Text-Layout encoder and an Optical Chemical Structure Recognition vision encoder. These representations are merged and used to auto-regressively generate a sequential graph representation of the Markush structure along with a table defining its variable groups. To overcome the lack of real-world training data, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that produces a wide range of realistic Markush structures. Additionally, we present M2S, the first annotated benchmark of real-world Markush structures, to advance research on this challenging task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art chemistry-specific and general-purpose vision-language models in most evaluation settings. Code, models, and datasets will be available.

Automatic table detection in PDF documents has achieved a great success but tabular data extraction are still challenging due to the integrity and noise issues in detected table areas. The accurate data extraction is extremely crucial in finance area. Inspired by this, the aim of this research is proposing an automated table detection and tabular data extraction from financial PDF documents. We proposed a method that consists of three main processes, which are detecting table areas with a Faster R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) model with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) on each page image, extracting contents and structures by a compounded layout segmentation technique based on optical character recognition (OCR) and formulating regular expression rules for table header separation. The tabular data extraction feature is embedded with rule-based filtering and restructuring functions that are highly scalable. We annotate a new Financial Documents dataset with table regions for the experiment. The excellent table detection performance of the detection model is obtained from our customized dataset. The main contributions of this paper are proposing the Financial Documents dataset with table-area annotations, the superior detection model and the rule-based layout segmentation technique for the tabular data extraction from PDF files.

Visual reasoning over structured data such as tables is a critical capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), yet current benchmarks remain limited in scale, diversity, or reasoning depth, especially when it comes to rendered table images. Addressing this gap, we introduce Visual-TableQA, a large-scale, open-domain multimodal dataset specifically designed to evaluate and enhance visual reasoning over complex tabular data. Our generation pipeline is modular, scalable, and fully autonomous, involving multiple reasoning LLMs collaborating across distinct roles: generation, validation, and inspiration. Visual-TableQA comprises 2.5k richly structured LaTeX-rendered tables and 6k reasoning-intensive QA pairs, all produced at a cost of under USD 100. To promote diversity and creativity, our pipeline performs multi-model collaborative data generation via cross-model prompting ('inspiration') and LLM-jury filtering. Stronger models seed layouts and topics that weaker models elaborate, collectively distilling diverse reasoning patterns and visual structures into the dataset. Empirical results show that models fine-tuned on Visual-TableQA generalize robustly to external benchmarks, outperforming several proprietary models despite the dataset's synthetic nature. The full pipeline and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-4-Everyone/Visual-TableQA.

In this work, we address the task of table image to LaTeX code generation, with the goal of automating the reconstruction of high-quality, publication-ready tables from visual inputs. A central challenge of this task lies in accurately handling complex tables -- those with large sizes, deeply nested structures, and semantically rich or irregular cell content -- where existing methods often fail. We begin with a comprehensive analysis, identifying key challenges and highlighting the limitations of current evaluation protocols. To overcome these issues, we propose a reinforced multimodal large language model (MLLM) framework, where a pre-trained MLLM is fine-tuned on a large-scale table-to-LaTeX dataset. To further improve generation quality, we introduce a dual-reward reinforcement learning strategy based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Unlike standard approaches that optimize purely over text outputs, our method incorporates both a structure-level reward on LaTeX code and a visual fidelity reward computed from rendered outputs, enabling direct optimization of the visual output quality. We adopt a hybrid evaluation protocol combining TEDS-Structure and CW-SSIM, and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly on structurally complex tables, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Table structure recognition is an essential part for making machines understand tables. Its main task is to recognize the internal structure of a table. However, due to the complexity and diversity in their structure and style, it is very difficult to parse the tabular data into the structured format which machines can understand easily, especially for complex tables. In this paper, we introduce Split, Embed and Merge (SEM), an accurate table structure recognizer. Our model takes table images as input and can correctly recognize the structure of tables, whether they are simple or a complex tables. SEM is mainly composed of three parts, splitter, embedder and merger. In the first stage, we apply the splitter to predict the potential regions of the table row (column) separators, and obtain the fine grid structure of the table. In the second stage, by taking a full consideration of the textual information in the table, we fuse the output features for each table grid from both vision and language modalities. Moreover, we achieve a higher precision in our experiments through adding additional semantic features. Finally, we process the merging of these basic table grids in a self-regression manner. The correspondent merging results is learned through the attention mechanism. In our experiments, SEM achieves an average F1-Measure of 97.11% on the SciTSR dataset which outperforms other methods by a large margin. We also won the first place in the complex table and third place in all tables in ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing, Task-B. Extensive experiments on other publicly available datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art.

Parameterized tight-binding models fit to first principles calculations can provide an efficient and accurate quantum mechanical method for predicting properties of molecules and solids. However, well-tested parameter sets are generally only available for a limited number of atom combinations, making routine use of this method difficult. Furthermore, most previous models consider only simple two-body interactions, which limits accuracy. To tackle these challenges, we develop a density functional theory database of nearly one million materials, which we use to fit a universal set of tight-binding parameters for 65 elements and their binary combinations. We include both two-body and three-body effective interaction terms in our model, plus self-consistent charge transfer, enabling our model to work for metallic, covalent, and ionic bonds with the same parameter set. To ensure predictive power, we adopt a learning framework where we repeatedly test the model on new low energy crystal structures and then add them to the fitting dataset, iterating until predictions improve. We distribute the materials database and tools developed in this work publicly.

Tabular in-context learning (ICL) has recently achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several tabular prediction tasks. Previously restricted to classification problems on small tables, recent advances such as TabPFN and TabICL have extended its use to larger datasets. While being architecturally efficient and well-adapted to tabular data structures, current table-native ICL architectures, being trained exclusively on synthetic data, do not fully leverage the rich semantics and world knowledge contained in real-world tabular data. On another end of this spectrum, tabular ICL models based on pretrained large language models such as TabuLa-8B integrate deep semantic understanding and world knowledge but are only able to make use of a small amount of context due to inherent architectural limitations. With the aim to combine the best of both these worlds, we introduce ConTextTab, integrating semantic understanding and alignment into a table-native ICL framework. By employing specialized embeddings for different data modalities and by training on large-scale real-world tabular data, our model is competitive with SOTA across a broad set of benchmarks while setting a new standard on the semantically rich CARTE benchmark.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively combines LLMs generative capabilities with external retrieval-based information. The Hybrid Document RAG task aims to integrate textual and hierarchical tabular data for more comprehensive retrieval and generation in complex scenarios. However, there is no existing dataset specifically designed for this task that includes both text and tabular data. Additionally, existing methods struggle to retrieve relevant tabular data and integrate it with text. Semantic similarity-based retrieval lacks accuracy, while table-specific methods fail to handle complex hierarchical structures effectively. Furthermore, the QA task requires complex reasoning and calculations, further complicating the challenge. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset, DocRAGLib, specifically designed for the question answering (QA) task scenario under Hybrid Document RAG. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HD-RAG, a novel framework that incorporates a row-and-column level (RCL) table representation, employs a two-stage process combining ensemble and LLM-based retrieval, and integrates RECAP, which is designed for multi-step reasoning and complex calculations in Document-QA tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments with DocRAGLib, showing that HD-RAG outperforms existing baselines in both retrieval accuracy and QA performance, demonstrating its effectiveness.

The conventional use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture has proven effective for retrieving information from diverse documents. However, challenges arise in handling complex table queries, especially within PDF documents containing intricate tabular structures.This research introduces an innovative approach to enhance the accuracy of complex table queries in RAG-based systems. Our methodology involves storing PDFs in the retrieval database and extracting tabular content separately. The extracted tables undergo a process of context enrichment, concatenating headers with corresponding values. To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the enriched data, we employ a fine-tuned version of the Llama-2-chat language model for summarisation within the RAG architecture. Furthermore, we augment the tabular data with contextual sense using the ChatGPT 3.5 API through a one-shot prompt. This enriched data is then fed into the retrieval database alongside other PDFs. Our approach aims to significantly improve the precision of complex table queries, offering a promising solution to a longstanding challenge in information retrieval.

In this paper, we revisit one of the simplest problems in data structures: the task of inserting elements into an open-addressed hash table so that elements can later be retrieved with as few probes as possible. We show that, even without reordering elements over time, it is possible to construct a hash table that achieves far better expected search complexities (both amortized and worst-case) than were previously thought possible. Along the way, we disprove the central conjecture left by Yao in his seminal paper ``Uniform Hashing is Optimal''. All of our results come with matching lower bounds.

We present DART, an open domain structured DAta Record to Text generation dataset with over 82k instances (DARTs). Data-to-Text annotations can be a costly process, especially when dealing with tables which are the major source of structured data and contain nontrivial structures. To this end, we propose a procedure of extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting the semantic dependencies among table headers and the table title. Our dataset construction framework effectively merged heterogeneous sources from open domain semantic parsing and dialogue-act-based meaning representation tasks by utilizing techniques such as: tree ontology annotation, question-answer pair to declarative sentence conversion, and predicate unification, all with minimum post-editing. We present systematic evaluation on DART as well as new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG 2017 to show that DART (1) poses new challenges to existing data-to-text datasets and (2) facilitates out-of-domain generalization. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/dart.

To address the challenges of table structure recognition, we propose a novel Split-Merge-based top-down model optimized for large, densely populated tables. Our approach formulates row and column splitting as sequence labeling tasks, utilizing dual Transformer encoders to capture feature interactions. The merging process is framed as a grid cell classification task, leveraging an additional Transformer encoder to ensure accurate and coherent merging. By eliminating unstable bounding box predictions, our method reduces resolution loss and computational complexity, achieving high accuracy while maintaining fast processing speed. Extensive experiments on FinTabNet and PubTabNet demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing approaches, particularly in real-world applications. Our method offers a robust, scalable, and efficient solution for large-scale table recognition, making it well-suited for industrial deployment.

Tables organize valuable content in a concise and compact representation. This content is extremely valuable for systems such as search engines, Knowledge Graph's, etc, since they enhance their predictive capabilities. Unfortunately, tables come in a large variety of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, they can have complex column/row-header configurations, multiline rows, different variety of separation lines, missing entries, etc. As such, the correct identification of the table-structure from an image is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we present a new table-structure identification model. The latter improves the latest end-to-end deep learning model (i.e. encoder-dual-decoder from PubTabNet) in two significant ways. First, we introduce a new object detection decoder for table-cells. In this way, we can obtain the content of the table-cells from programmatic PDF's directly from the PDF source and avoid the training of the custom OCR decoders. This architectural change leads to more accurate table-content extraction and allows us to tackle non-english tables. Second, we replace the LSTM decoders with transformer based decoders. This upgrade improves significantly the previous state-of-the-art tree-editing-distance-score (TEDS) from 91% to 98.5% on simple tables and from 88.7% to 95% on complex tables.

Benchmark datasets for table structure recognition (TSR) must be carefully processed to ensure they are annotated consistently. However, even if a dataset's annotations are self-consistent, there may be significant inconsistency across datasets, which can harm the performance of models trained and evaluated on them. In this work, we show that aligning these benchmarksx2014removing both errors and inconsistency between themx2014improves model performance significantly. We demonstrate this through a data-centric approach where we adopt a single model architecture, the Table Transformer (TATR), that we hold fixed throughout. Baseline exact match accuracy for TATR evaluated on the ICDAR-2013 benchmark is 65% when trained on PubTables-1M, 42% when trained on FinTabNet, and 69% combined. After reducing annotation mistakes and inter-dataset inconsistency, performance of TATR evaluated on ICDAR-2013 increases substantially to 75% when trained on PubTables-1M, 65% when trained on FinTabNet, and 81% combined. We show through ablations over the modification steps that canonicalization of the table annotations has a significantly positive effect on performance, while other choices balance necessary trade-offs that arise when deciding a benchmark dataset's final composition. Overall we believe our work has significant implications for benchmark design for TSR and potentially other tasks as well. All dataset processing and training code will be released.

As global trends are shifting towards data-driven industries, the demand for automated algorithms that can convert digital images of scanned documents into machine readable information is rapidly growing. Besides the opportunity of data digitization for the application of data analytic tools, there is also a massive improvement towards automation of processes, which previously would require manual inspection of the documents. Although the introduction of optical character recognition technologies mostly solved the task of converting human-readable characters from images into machine-readable characters, the task of extracting table semantics has been less focused on over the years. The recognition of tables consists of two main tasks, namely table detection and table structure recognition. Most prior work on this problem focuses on either task without offering an end-to-end solution or paying attention to real application conditions like rotated images or noise artefacts inside the document image. Recent work shows a clear trend towards deep learning approaches coupled with the use of transfer learning for the task of table structure recognition due to the lack of sufficiently large datasets. In this paper we present a multistage pipeline named Multi-Type-TD-TSR, which offers an end-to-end solution for the problem of table recognition. It utilizes state-of-the-art deep learning models for table detection and differentiates between 3 different types of tables based on the tables' borders. For the table structure recognition we use a deterministic non-data driven algorithm, which works on all table types. We additionally present two algorithms. One for unbordered tables and one for bordered tables, which are the base of the used table structure recognition algorithm. We evaluate Multi-Type-TD-TSR on the ICDAR 2019 table structure recognition dataset and achieve a new state-of-the-art.

In this paper, we propose a new class of metric for table structure recognition (TSR) evaluation, called grid table similarity (GriTS). Unlike prior metrics, GriTS evaluates the correctness of a predicted table directly in its natural form as a matrix. To create a similarity measure between matrices, we generalize the two-dimensional largest common substructure (2D-LCS) problem, which is NP-hard, to the 2D most similar substructures (2D-MSS) problem and propose a polynomial-time heuristic for solving it. This algorithm produces both an upper and a lower bound on the true similarity between matrices. We show using evaluation on a large real-world dataset that in practice there is almost no difference between these bounds. We compare GriTS to other metrics and empirically validate that matrix similarity exhibits more desirable behavior than alternatives for TSR performance evaluation. Finally, GriTS unifies all three subtasks of cell topology recognition, cell location recognition, and cell content recognition within the same framework, which simplifies the evaluation and enables more meaningful comparisons across different types of TSR approaches. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer.

An automatic table recognition method for interpretation of tabular data in document images majorly involves solving two problems of table detection and table structure recognition. The prior work involved solving both problems independently using two separate approaches. More recent works signify the use of deep learning-based solutions while also attempting to design an end to end solution. In this paper, we present an improved deep learning-based end to end approach for solving both problems of table detection and structure recognition using a single Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model. We propose CascadeTabNet: a Cascade mask Region-based CNN High-Resolution Network (Cascade mask R-CNN HRNet) based model that detects the regions of tables and recognizes the structural body cells from the detected tables at the same time. We evaluate our results on ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2019 and TableBank public datasets. We achieved 3rd rank in ICDAR 2019 post-competition results for table detection while attaining the best accuracy results for the ICDAR 2013 and TableBank dataset. We also attain the highest accuracy results on the ICDAR 2019 table structure recognition dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate effective transfer learning and image augmentation techniques that enable CNNs to achieve very accurate table detection results. Code and dataset has been made available at: https://github.com/DevashishPrasad/CascadeTabNet

Table structure recognition is a key task in document analysis. However, the geometric deformation in deformed tables causes a weak correlation between content information and structure, resulting in downstream tasks not being able to obtain accurate content information. To obtain fine-grained spatial coordinates of cells, we propose the OG-HFYOLO model, which enhances the edge response by Gradient Orientation-aware Extractor, combines a Heterogeneous Kernel Cross Fusion module and a scale-aware loss function to adapt to multi-scale objective features, and introduces mask-driven non-maximal suppression in the post-processing, which replaces the traditional bounding box suppression mechanism. Furthermore, we also propose a data generator, filling the gap in the dataset for fine-grained deformation table cell spatial coordinate localization, and derive a large-scale dataset named Deformation Wired Table (DWTAL). Experiments show that our proposed model demonstrates excellent segmentation accuracy on all mainstream instance segmentation models. The dataset and the source code are open source: https://github.com/justliulong/OGHFYOLO.

The majority of data in businesses and industries is stored in tables, databases, and data warehouses. Reasoning with table-structured data poses significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its hidden semantics, inherent complexity, and structured nature. One of these challenges is lacking an effective evaluation benchmark fairly reflecting the performances of LLMs on broad table reasoning abilities. In this paper, we fill in this gap, presenting a comprehensive table reasoning evolution benchmark, TReB, which measures both shallow table understanding abilities and deep table reasoning abilities, a total of 26 sub-tasks. We construct a high quality dataset through an iterative data processing procedure. We create an evaluation framework to robustly measure table reasoning capabilities with three distinct inference modes, TCoT, PoT and ICoT. Further, we benchmark over 20 state-of-the-art LLMs using this frame work and prove its effectiveness. Experimental results reveal that existing LLMs still have significant room for improvement in addressing the complex and real world Table related tasks. Both the dataset and evaluation framework are publicly available, with the dataset hosted on [HuggingFace] and the framework on [GitHub].

Important information that relates to a specific topic in a document is often organized in tabular format to assist readers with information retrieval and comparison, which may be difficult to provide in natural language. However, tabular data in unstructured digital documents, e.g., Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, are difficult to parse into structured machine-readable format, due to complexity and diversity in their structure and style. To facilitate image-based table recognition with deep learning, we develop the largest publicly available table recognition dataset PubTabNet (https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubTabNet), containing 568k table images with corresponding structured HTML representation. PubTabNet is automatically generated by matching the XML and PDF representations of the scientific articles in PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMCOA). We also propose a novel attention-based encoder-dual-decoder (EDD) architecture that converts images of tables into HTML code. The model has a structure decoder which reconstructs the table structure and helps the cell decoder to recognize cell content. In addition, we propose a new Tree-Edit-Distance-based Similarity (TEDS) metric for table recognition, which more appropriately captures multi-hop cell misalignment and OCR errors than the pre-established metric. The experiments demonstrate that the EDD model can accurately recognize complex tables solely relying on the image representation, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 9.7% absolute TEDS score.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have advanced table understanding capabilities but rely on converting tables into text sequences. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable direct visual processing, they face limitations in handling scientific tables due to fixed input image resolutions and insufficient numerical reasoning capabilities. We present a comprehensive framework for multimodal scientific table understanding and reasoning with dynamic input image resolutions. Our framework consists of three key components: (1) MMSci-Pre, a domain-specific table structure learning dataset of 52K scientific table structure recognition samples, (2) MMSci-Ins, an instruction tuning dataset with 12K samples across three table-based tasks, and (3) MMSci-Eval, a benchmark with 3,114 testing samples specifically designed to evaluate numerical reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our domain-specific approach with 52K scientific table images achieves superior performance compared to 150K general-domain tables, highlighting the importance of data quality over quantity. Our proposed table-based MLLMs with dynamic input resolutions show significant improvements in both general table understanding and numerical reasoning capabilities, with strong generalisation to held-out datasets. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/MMSci_Table.

Table Question Answering (TQA) aims at composing an answer to a question based on tabular data. While prior research has shown that TQA models lack robustness, understanding the underlying cause and nature of this issue remains predominantly unclear, posing a significant obstacle to the development of robust TQA systems. In this paper, we formalize three major desiderata for a fine-grained evaluation of robustness of TQA systems. They should (i) answer questions regardless of alterations in table structure, (ii) base their responses on the content of relevant cells rather than on biases, and (iii) demonstrate robust numerical reasoning capabilities. To investigate these aspects, we create and publish a novel TQA evaluation benchmark in English. Our extensive experimental analysis reveals that none of the examined state-of-the-art TQA systems consistently excels in these three aspects. Our benchmark is a crucial instrument for monitoring the behavior of TQA systems and paves the way for the development of robust TQA systems. We release our benchmark publicly.

Recent advances in tabular question answering (QA) with large language models are constrained in their coverage and only answer questions over a single table. However, real-world queries are complex in nature, often over multiple tables in a relational database or web page. Single table questions do not involve common table operations such as set operations, Cartesian products (joins), or nested queries. Furthermore, multi-table operations often result in a tabular output, which necessitates table generation capabilities of tabular QA models. To fill this gap, we propose a new task of answering questions over multiple tables. Our model, MultiTabQA, not only answers questions over multiple tables, but also generalizes to generate tabular answers. To enable effective training, we build a pre-training dataset comprising of 132,645 SQL queries and tabular answers. Further, we evaluate the generated tables by introducing table-specific metrics of varying strictness assessing various levels of granularity of the table structure. MultiTabQA outperforms state-of-the-art single table QA models adapted to a multi-table QA setting by finetuning on three datasets: Spider, Atis and GeoQuery.

In this paper, we establish a benchmark for table visual question answering, referred to as the TableVQA-Bench, derived from pre-existing table question-answering (QA) and table structure recognition datasets. It is important to note that existing datasets have not incorporated images or QA pairs, which are two crucial components of TableVQA. As such, the primary objective of this paper is to obtain these necessary components. Specifically, images are sourced either through the application of a stylesheet or by employing the proposed table rendering system. QA pairs are generated by exploiting the large language model (LLM) where the input is a text-formatted table. Ultimately, the completed TableVQA-Bench comprises 1,500 QA pairs. We comprehensively compare the performance of various multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) on TableVQA-Bench. GPT-4V achieves the highest accuracy among commercial and open-sourced MLLMs from our experiments. Moreover, we discover that the number of vision queries plays a significant role in TableVQA performance. To further analyze the capabilities of MLLMs in comparison to their LLM backbones, we investigate by presenting image-formatted tables to MLLMs and text-formatted tables to LLMs, respectively. Our findings suggest that processing visual inputs is more challenging than text inputs, as evidenced by the lower performance of MLLMs, despite generally requiring higher computational costs than LLMs. The proposed TableVQA-Bench and evaluation codes are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/tablevqabench{https://github.com/naver-ai/tablevqabench}.

Tables are a popular and efficient means of presenting structured information. They are used extensively in various kinds of documents including web pages. Tables display information as a two-dimensional matrix, the semantics of which is conveyed by a mixture of structure (rows, columns), headers, caption, and content. Recent research has started to consider tables as first class objects, not just as an addendum to texts, yielding interesting results for problems like table matching, table completion, or value imputation. All of these problems inherently rely on an accurate measure for the semantic similarity of two tables. We present TabSim, a novel method to compute table similarity scores using deep neural networks. Conceptually, TabSim represents a table as a learned concatenation of embeddings of its caption, its content, and its structure. Given two tables in this representation, a Siamese neural network is trained to compute a score correlating with the tables' semantic similarity. To train and evaluate our method, we created a gold standard corpus consisting of 1500 table pairs extracted from biomedical articles and manually scored regarding their degree of similarity, and adopted two other corpora originally developed for a different yet similar task. Our evaluation shows that TabSim outperforms other table similarity measures on average by app. 7% pp F1-score in a binary similarity classification setting and by app. 1.5% pp in a ranking scenario.

Table entailment, the binary classification task of finding if a sentence is supported or refuted by the content of a table, requires parsing language and table structure as well as numerical and discrete reasoning. While there is extensive work on textual entailment, table entailment is less well studied. We adapt TAPAS (Herzig et al., 2020), a table-based BERT model, to recognize entailment. Motivated by the benefits of data augmentation, we create a balanced dataset of millions of automatically created training examples which are learned in an intermediate step prior to fine-tuning. This new data is not only useful for table entailment, but also for SQA (Iyyer et al., 2017), a sequential table QA task. To be able to use long examples as input of BERT models, we evaluate table pruning techniques as a pre-processing step to drastically improve the training and prediction efficiency at a moderate drop in accuracy. The different methods set the new state-of-the-art on the TabFact (Chen et al., 2020) and SQA datasets.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6% on WIKITABLEQUESTIONS, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.

PaliGemma 2 is an upgrade of the PaliGemma open Vision-Language Model (VLM) based on the Gemma 2 family of language models. We combine the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder that was also used by PaliGemma with the whole range of Gemma 2 models, from the 2B one all the way up to the 27B model. We train these models at three resolutions (224px, 448px, and 896px) in multiple stages to equip them with broad knowledge for transfer via fine-tuning. The resulting family of base models covering different model sizes and resolutions allows us to investigate factors impacting transfer performance (such as learning rate) and to analyze the interplay between the type of task, model size, and resolution. We further increase the number and breadth of transfer tasks beyond the scope of PaliGemma including different OCR-related tasks such as table structure recognition, molecular structure recognition, music score recognition, as well as long fine-grained captioning and radiography report generation, on which PaliGemma 2 obtains state-of-the-art results.

This technical report introduces Docling, an easy to use, self-contained, MIT-licensed open-source package for PDF document conversion. It is powered by state-of-the-art specialized AI models for layout analysis (DocLayNet) and table structure recognition (TableFormer), and runs efficiently on commodity hardware in a small resource budget. The code interface allows for easy extensibility and addition of new features and models.

We introduce Docling, an easy-to-use, self-contained, MIT-licensed, open-source toolkit for document conversion, that can parse several types of popular document formats into a unified, richly structured representation. It is powered by state-of-the-art specialized AI models for layout analysis (DocLayNet) and table structure recognition (TableFormer), and runs efficiently on commodity hardware in a small resource budget. Docling is released as a Python package and can be used as a Python API or as a CLI tool. Docling's modular architecture and efficient document representation make it easy to implement extensions, new features, models, and customizations. Docling has been already integrated in other popular open-source frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, spaCy), making it a natural fit for the processing of documents and the development of high-end applications. The open-source community has fully engaged in using, promoting, and developing for Docling, which gathered 10k stars on GitHub in less than a month and was reported as the No. 1 trending repository in GitHub worldwide in November 2024.

Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.

With the growing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in document processing, robust text recognition has become increasingly critical for knowledge extraction. While OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for English and other languages benefits from large datasets and well-established benchmarks, Arabic OCR faces unique challenges due to its cursive script, right-to-left text flow, and complex typographic and calligraphic features. We present KITAB-Bench, a comprehensive Arabic OCR benchmark that fills the gaps in current evaluation systems. Our benchmark comprises 8,809 samples across 9 major domains and 36 sub-domains, encompassing diverse document types including handwritten text, structured tables, and specialized coverage of 21 chart types for business intelligence. Our findings show that modern vision-language models (such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Qwen) outperform traditional OCR approaches (like EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and Surya) by an average of 60% in Character Error Rate (CER). Furthermore, we highlight significant limitations of current Arabic OCR models, particularly in PDF-to-Markdown conversion, where the best model Gemini-2.0-Flash achieves only 65% accuracy. This underscores the challenges in accurately recognizing Arabic text, including issues with complex fonts, numeral recognition errors, word elongation, and table structure detection. This work establishes a rigorous evaluation framework that can drive improvements in Arabic document analysis methods and bridge the performance gap with English OCR technologies.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

In this report, we introduce DocXChain, a powerful open-source toolchain for document parsing, which is designed and developed to automatically convert the rich information embodied in unstructured documents, such as text, tables and charts, into structured representations that are readable and manipulable by machines. Specifically, basic capabilities, including text detection, text recognition, table structure recognition and layout analysis, are provided. Upon these basic capabilities, we also build a set of fully functional pipelines for document parsing, i.e., general text reading, table parsing, and document structurization, to drive various applications related to documents in real-world scenarios. Moreover, DocXChain is concise, modularized and flexible, such that it can be readily integrated with existing tools, libraries or models (such as LangChain and ChatGPT), to construct more powerful systems that can accomplish more complicated and challenging tasks. The code of DocXChain is publicly available at:~https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/Applications/DocXChain

In this paper, we present StrucTexTv2, an effective document image pre-training framework, by performing masked visual-textual prediction. It consists of two self-supervised pre-training tasks: masked image modeling and masked language modeling, based on text region-level image masking. The proposed method randomly masks some image regions according to the bounding box coordinates of text words. The objectives of our pre-training tasks are reconstructing the pixels of masked image regions and the corresponding masked tokens simultaneously. Hence the pre-trained encoder can capture more textual semantics in comparison to the masked image modeling that usually predicts the masked image patches. Compared to the masked multi-modal modeling methods for document image understanding that rely on both the image and text modalities, StrucTexTv2 models image-only input and potentially deals with more application scenarios free from OCR pre-processing. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks of document image understanding demonstrate the effectiveness of StrucTexTv2. It achieves competitive or even new state-of-the-art performance in various downstream tasks such as image classification, layout analysis, table structure recognition, document OCR, and information extraction under the end-to-end scenario.

Tables are widely used in several types of documents since they can bring important information in a structured way. In scientific papers, tables can sum up novel discoveries and summarize experimental results, making the research comparable and easily understandable by scholars. Several methods perform table analysis working on document images, losing useful information during the conversion from the PDF files since OCR tools can be prone to recognition errors, in particular for text inside tables. The main contribution of this work is to tackle the problem of table extraction, exploiting Graph Neural Networks. Node features are enriched with suitably designed representation embeddings. These representations help to better distinguish not only tables from the other parts of the paper, but also table cells from table headers. We experimentally evaluated the proposed approach on a new dataset obtained by merging the information provided in the PubLayNet and PubTables-1M datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming attractive as few-shot reasoners to solve Natural Language (NL)-related tasks. However, the understanding of their capability to process structured data like tables remains an under-explored area. While tables can be serialized as input for LLMs, there is a lack of comprehensive studies on whether LLMs genuinely comprehend this data. In this paper, we try to understand this by designing a benchmark to evaluate the structural understanding capabilities of LLMs through seven distinct tasks, e.g., cell lookup, row retrieval and size detection. Specially, we perform a series of evaluations on the recent most advanced LLM models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and observe that performance varied with different input choices, including table input format, content order, role prompting, and partition marks. Drawing from the insights gained through the benchmark evaluations, we propose self-augmentation for effective structural prompting, such as critical value / range identification using internal knowledge of LLMs. When combined with carefully chosen input choices, these structural prompting methods lead to promising improvements in LLM performance on a variety of tabular tasks, e.g., TabFact(uparrow2.31%), HybridQA(uparrow2.13%), SQA(uparrow2.72%), Feverous(uparrow0.84%), and ToTTo(uparrow5.68%). We believe that our open source benchmark and proposed prompting methods can serve as a simple yet generic selection for future research. The code and data of this paper will be temporality released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StructuredLLM-76F3/README.md and will be replaced with an official one at https://github.com/microsoft/TableProvider later.

Semi-structured tables, widely used in real-world applications (e.g., financial reports, medical records, transactional orders), often involve flexible and complex layouts (e.g., hierarchical headers and merged cells). These tables generally rely on human analysts to interpret table layouts and answer relevant natural language questions, which is costly and inefficient. To automate the procedure, existing methods face significant challenges. First, methods like NL2SQL require converting semi-structured tables into structured ones, which often causes substantial information loss. Second, methods like NL2Code and multi-modal LLM QA struggle to understand the complex layouts of semi-structured tables and cannot accurately answer corresponding questions. To this end, we propose ST-Raptor, a tree-based framework for semi-structured table question answering using large language models. First, we introduce the Hierarchical Orthogonal Tree (HO-Tree), a structural model that captures complex semi-structured table layouts, along with an effective algorithm for constructing the tree. Second, we define a set of basic tree operations to guide LLMs in executing common QA tasks. Given a user question, ST-Raptor decomposes it into simpler sub-questions, generates corresponding tree operation pipelines, and conducts operation-table alignment for accurate pipeline execution. Third, we incorporate a two-stage verification mechanism: forward validation checks the correctness of execution steps, while backward validation evaluates answer reliability by reconstructing queries from predicted answers. To benchmark the performance, we present SSTQA, a dataset of 764 questions over 102 real-world semi-structured tables. Experiments show that ST-Raptor outperforms nine baselines by up to 20% in answer accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/weAIDB/ST-Raptor.

Tables are among the most widely used tools for representing structured data in research, business, medicine, and education. Although LLMs demonstrate strong performance in downstream tasks, their efficiency in processing tabular data remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of both text-based and multimodal LLMs on table understanding tasks through a cross-domain and cross-modality evaluation. Specifically, we compare their performance on tables from scientific vs. non-scientific contexts and examine their robustness on tables represented as images vs. text. Additionally, we conduct an interpretability analysis to measure context usage and input relevance. We also introduce the TableEval benchmark, comprising 3017 tables from scholarly publications, Wikipedia, and financial reports, where each table is provided in five different formats: Image, Dictionary, HTML, XML, and LaTeX. Our findings indicate that while LLMs maintain robustness across table modalities, they face significant challenges when processing scientific tables.

Tabular data is a crucial form of information expression, which can organize data in a standard structure for easy information retrieval and comparison. However, in financial industry and many other fields tables are often disclosed in unstructured digital files, e.g. Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, which are difficult to be extracted directly. In this paper, to facilitate deep learning based table extraction from unstructured digital files, we publish a standard Chinese dataset named FinTab, which contains more than 1,600 financial tables of diverse kinds and their corresponding structure representation in JSON. In addition, we propose a novel graph-based convolutional neural network model named GFTE as a baseline for future comparison. GFTE integrates image feature, position feature and textual feature together for precise edge prediction and reaches overall good results.

Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 6-48 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model's generalizability. We will open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.

Tables stored in databases and tables which are present in web pages and articles account for a large part of semi-structured data that is available on the internet. It then becomes pertinent to develop a modeling approach with large language models (LLMs) that can be used to solve diverse table tasks such as semantic parsing, question answering as well as classification problems. Traditionally, there existed separate models specialized for each task individually. It raises the question of how far can we go to build a unified model that works well on some table tasks without significant degradation on others. To that end, we attempt at creating a shared modeling approach in the pretraining stage with encoder-decoder style LLMs that can cater to diverse tasks. We evaluate our approach that continually pretrains and finetunes different model families of T5 with data from tables and surrounding context, on these downstream tasks at different model scales. Through multiple ablation studies, we observe that our pretraining with self-supervised objectives can significantly boost the performance of the models on these tasks. As an example of one improvement, we observe that the instruction finetuned public models which come specialized on text question answering (QA) and have been trained on table data still have room for improvement when it comes to table specific QA. Our work is the first attempt at studying the advantages of a unified approach to table specific pretraining when scaled from 770M to 11B sequence to sequence models while also comparing the instruction finetuned variants of the models.

The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table's content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model's ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model's confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15%.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on large volumes of data excel at various natural language tasks, but they cannot handle tasks requiring knowledge that has not been trained on previously. One solution is to use a retriever that fetches relevant information to expand LLM's knowledge scope. However, existing textual-oriented retrieval-based LLMs are not ideal on structured table data due to diversified data modalities and large table sizes. In this work, we propose OpenTab, an open-domain table reasoning framework powered by LLMs. Overall, OpenTab leverages table retriever to fetch relevant tables and then generates SQL programs to parse the retrieved tables efficiently. Utilizing the intermediate data derived from the SQL executions, it conducts grounded inference to produce accurate response. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that OpenTab significantly outperforms baselines in both open- and closed-domain settings, achieving up to 21.5% higher accuracy. We further run ablation studies to validate the efficacy of our proposed designs of the system.

Fact verification has attracted a lot of attention in the machine learning and natural language processing communities, as it is one of the key methods for detecting misinformation. Existing large-scale benchmarks for this task have focused mostly on textual sources, i.e. unstructured information, and thus ignored the wealth of information available in structured formats, such as tables. In this paper we introduce a novel dataset and benchmark, Fact Extraction and VERification Over Unstructured and Structured information (FEVEROUS), which consists of 87,026 verified claims. Each claim is annotated with evidence in the form of sentences and/or cells from tables in Wikipedia, as well as a label indicating whether this evidence supports, refutes, or does not provide enough information to reach a verdict. Furthermore, we detail our efforts to track and minimize the biases present in the dataset and could be exploited by models, e.g. being able to predict the label without using evidence. Finally, we develop a baseline for verifying claims against text and tables which predicts both the correct evidence and verdict for 18% of the claims.

When conducting literature reviews, scientists often create literature review tables - tables whose rows are publications and whose columns constitute a schema, a set of aspects used to compare and contrast the papers. Can we automatically generate these tables using language models (LMs)? In this work, we introduce a framework that leverages LMs to perform this task by decomposing it into separate schema and value generation steps. To enable experimentation, we address two main challenges: First, we overcome a lack of high-quality datasets to benchmark table generation by curating and releasing arxivDIGESTables, a new dataset of 2,228 literature review tables extracted from ArXiv papers that synthesize a total of 7,542 research papers. Second, to support scalable evaluation of model generations against human-authored reference tables, we develop DecontextEval, an automatic evaluation method that aligns elements of tables with the same underlying aspects despite differing surface forms. Given these tools, we evaluate LMs' abilities to reconstruct reference tables, finding this task benefits from additional context to ground the generation (e.g. table captions, in-text references). Finally, through a human evaluation study we find that even when LMs fail to fully reconstruct a reference table, their generated novel aspects can still be useful.

The success of deep learning has sparked interest in improving relational table tasks, like data preparation and search, with table representation models trained on large table corpora. Existing table corpora primarily contain tables extracted from HTML pages, limiting the capability to represent offline database tables. To train and evaluate high-capacity models for applications beyond the Web, we need resources with tables that resemble relational database tables. Here we introduce GitTables, a corpus of 1M relational tables extracted from GitHub. Our continuing curation aims at growing the corpus to at least 10M tables. Analyses of GitTables show that its structure, content, and topical coverage differ significantly from existing table corpora. We annotate table columns in GitTables with semantic types, hierarchical relations and descriptions from Schema.org and DBpedia. The evaluation of our annotation pipeline on the T2Dv2 benchmark illustrates that our approach provides results on par with human annotations. We present three applications of GitTables, demonstrating its value for learned semantic type detection models, schema completion methods, and benchmarks for table-to-KG matching, data search, and preparation. We make the corpus and code available at https://gittables.github.io.

We present TableBank, a new image-based table detection and recognition dataset built with novel weak supervision from Word and Latex documents on the internet. Existing research for image-based table detection and recognition usually fine-tunes pre-trained models on out-of-domain data with a few thousand human-labeled examples, which is difficult to generalize on real-world applications. With TableBank that contains 417K high quality labeled tables, we build several strong baselines using state-of-the-art models with deep neural networks. We make TableBank publicly available and hope it will empower more deep learning approaches in the table detection and recognition task. The dataset and models are available at https://github.com/doc-analysis/TableBank.

Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.

Table recognition (TR) aims to transform table images into semi-structured representations such as HTML or Markdown. As a core component of document parsing, TR has long relied on supervised learning, with recent efforts dominated by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) using labeled data. While VLMs have brought TR to the next level, pushing performance further demands large-scale labeled data that is costly to obtain. Consequently, although proprietary models have continuously pushed the performance boundary, open-source models, often trained with limited resources and, in practice, the only viable option for many due to privacy regulations, still lag far behind. To bridge this gap, we introduce TRivia, a self-supervised fine-tuning method that enables pretrained VLMs to learn TR directly from unlabeled table images in the wild. Built upon Group Relative Policy Optimization, TRivia automatically identifies unlabeled samples that most effectively facilitate learning and eliminates the need for human annotations through a question-answering-based reward mechanism. An attention-guided module generates diverse questions for each table image, and the ability to interpret the recognition results and answer them correctly provides feedback to optimize the TR model. This closed-loop process allows the TR model to autonomously learn to recognize, structure, and reason over tables without labeled data. Leveraging this pipeline, we present TRivia-3B, an open-sourced, compact, and state-of-the-art TR model that surpasses existing systems (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro, MinerU2.5) on three popular benchmarks. Model and code are released at: https://github.com/opendatalab/TRivia

Although great progress has been made by previous table understanding methods including recent approaches based on large language models (LLMs), they rely heavily on the premise that given tables must be converted into a certain text sequence (such as Markdown or HTML) to serve as model input. However, it is difficult to access such high-quality textual table representations in some real-world scenarios, and table images are much more accessible. Therefore, how to directly understand tables using intuitive visual information is a crucial and urgent challenge for developing more practical applications. In this paper, we propose a new problem, multimodal table understanding, where the model needs to generate correct responses to various table-related requests based on the given table image. To facilitate both the model training and evaluation, we construct a large-scale dataset named MMTab, which covers a wide spectrum of table images, instructions and tasks. On this basis, we develop Table-LLaVA, a generalist tabular multimodal large language model (MLLM), which significantly outperforms recent open-source MLLM baselines on 23 benchmarks under held-in and held-out settings. The code and data is available at this https://github.com/SpursGoZmy/Table-LLaVA

Tables and table-based use cases play a crucial role in many important real-world applications, such as spreadsheets, databases, and computational notebooks, which traditionally require expert-level users like data engineers, data analysts, and database administrators to operate. Although LLMs have shown remarkable progress in working with tables (e.g., in spreadsheet and database copilot scenarios), comprehensive benchmarking of such capabilities remains limited. In contrast to an extensive and growing list of NLP benchmarks, evaluations of table-related tasks are scarce, and narrowly focus on tasks like NL-to-SQL and Table-QA, overlooking the broader spectrum of real-world tasks that professional users face. This gap limits our understanding and model progress in this important area. In this work, we introduce MMTU, a large-scale benchmark with over 30K questions across 25 real-world table tasks, designed to comprehensively evaluate models ability to understand, reason, and manipulate real tables at the expert-level. These tasks are drawn from decades' worth of computer science research on tabular data, with a focus on complex table tasks faced by professional users. We show that MMTU require a combination of skills -- including table understanding, reasoning, and coding -- that remain challenging for today's frontier models, where even frontier reasoning models like OpenAI o4-mini and DeepSeek R1 score only around 60%, suggesting significant room for improvement. We highlight key findings in our evaluation using MMTU and hope that this benchmark drives further advances in understanding and developing foundation models for structured data processing and analysis. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MMTU-Benchmark/MMTU and https://huggingface.co/datasets/MMTU-benchmark/MMTU.

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Table foundation models bring high hopes to data science: pre-trained on tabular data to embark knowledge or priors, they should facilitate downstream tasks on tables. One specific challenge is that of data semantics: numerical entries take their meaning from context, e.g., column name. Pre-trained neural networks that jointly model column names and table entries have recently boosted prediction accuracy. While these models outline the promises of world knowledge to interpret table values, they lack the convenience of popular foundation models in text or vision. Indeed, they must be fine-tuned to bring benefits, come with sizeable computation costs, and cannot easily be reused or combined with other architectures. Here we introduce TARTE, a foundation model that transforms tables to knowledge-enhanced vector representations using the string to capture semantics. Pre-trained on large relational data, TARTE yields representations that facilitate subsequent learning with little additional cost. These representations can be fine-tuned or combined with other learners, giving models that push the state-of-the-art prediction performance and improve the prediction/computation performance trade-off. Specialized to a task or a domain, TARTE gives domain-specific representations that facilitate further learning. Our study demonstrates an effective approach to knowledge pre-training for tabular learning.

Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and struggle with complex queries due to incomplete or dispersed data across different table sections. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processor suite for leveraging LLMs in table-based tasks effectively. It covers several distinct components: (1) table sampling to decompose large tables into manageable sub-tables based on query semantics, (2) table augmentation to enhance tables with additional knowledge from external sources or models, and (3) table packing & serialization to convert tables into various formats suitable for LLMs' understanding. In each module, we design and compare several common methods under various usage scenarios, aiming to shed light on the best practices for leveraging LLMs for table-reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that our method improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of structured decoding for text-to-table generation with large language models (LLMs). While previous work has primarily focused on unconstrained generation of tables, the impact of enforcing structural constraints during generation remains underexplored. We systematically compare schema-guided (structured) decoding to standard one-shot prompting across three diverse benchmarks - E2E, Rotowire, and Livesum - using open-source LLMs of up to 32B parameters, assessing the performance of table generation approaches in resource-constrained settings. Our experiments cover a wide range of evaluation metrics at cell, row, and table levels. Results demonstrate that structured decoding significantly enhances the validity and alignment of generated tables, particularly in scenarios demanding precise numerical alignment (Rotowire), but may degrade performance in contexts involving densely packed textual information (E2E) or extensive aggregation over lengthy texts (Livesum). We further analyze the suitability of different evaluation metrics and discuss the influence of model size.

Relevant information in documents is often summarized in tables, helping the reader to identify useful facts. Most benchmark datasets support either document layout analysis or table understanding, but lack in providing data to apply both tasks in a unified way. We define the task of Contextualized Table Extraction (CTE), which aims to extract and define the structure of tables considering the textual context of the document. The dataset comprises 75k fully annotated pages of scientific papers, including more than 35k tables. Data are gathered from PubMed Central, merging the information provided by annotations in the PubTables-1M and PubLayNet datasets. The dataset can support CTE and adds new classes to the original ones. The generated annotations can be used to develop end-to-end pipelines for various tasks, including document layout analysis, table detection, structure recognition, and functional analysis. We formally define CTE and evaluation metrics, showing which subtasks can be tackled, describing advantages, limitations, and future works of this collection of data. Annotations and code will be accessible a https://github.com/AILab-UniFI/cte-dataset.

This work presents a sparse-attention Transformer architecture for modeling documents that contain large tables. Tables are ubiquitous on the web, and are rich in information. However, more than 20% of relational tables on the web have 20 or more rows (Cafarella et al., 2008), and these large tables present a challenge for current Transformer models, which are typically limited to 512 tokens. Here we propose MATE, a novel Transformer architecture designed to model the structure of web tables. MATE uses sparse attention in a way that allows heads to efficiently attend to either rows or columns in a table. This architecture scales linearly with respect to speed and memory, and can handle documents containing more than 8000 tokens with current accelerators. MATE also has a more appropriate inductive bias for tabular data, and sets a new state-of-the-art for three table reasoning datasets. For HybridQA (Chen et al., 2020b), a dataset that involves large documents containing tables, we improve the best prior result by 19 points.

We introduce Nemotron-Parse-1.1, a lightweight document parsing and OCR model that advances the capabilities of its predecessor, Nemoretriever-Parse-1.0. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 delivers improved capabilities across general OCR, markdown formatting, structured table parsing, and text extraction from pictures, charts, and diagrams. It also supports a longer output sequence length for visually dense documents. As with its predecessor, it extracts bounding boxes of text segments, as well as corresponding semantic classes. Nemotron-Parse-1.1 follows an encoder-decoder architecture with 885M parameters, including a compact 256M-parameter language decoder. It achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks making it a strong lightweight OCR solution. We release the model weights publicly on Huggingface, as well as an optimized NIM container, along with a subset of the training data as part of the broader Nemotron-VLM-v2 dataset. Additionally, we release Nemotron-Parse-1.1-TC which operates on a reduced vision token length, offering a 20% speed improvement with minimal quality degradation.

Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to understand visually-rich documents to answer questions in natural language, which is an emerging research topic for both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. In this work, we introduce a new Document VQA dataset, named TAT-DQA, which consists of 3,067 document pages comprising semi-structured table(s) and unstructured text as well as 16,558 question-answer pairs by extending the TAT-QA dataset. These documents are sampled from real-world financial reports and contain lots of numbers, which means discrete reasoning capability is demanded to answer questions on this dataset. Based on TAT-DQA, we further develop a novel model named MHST that takes into account the information in multi-modalities, including text, layout and visual image, to intelligently address different types of questions with corresponding strategies, i.e., extraction or reasoning. Extensive experiments show that the MHST model significantly outperforms the baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, the performance still lags far behind that of expert humans. We expect that our new TAT-DQA dataset would facilitate the research on deep understanding of visually-rich documents combining vision and language, especially for scenarios that require discrete reasoning. Also, we hope the proposed model would inspire researchers to design more advanced Document VQA models in future. Our dataset will be publicly available for non-commercial use at https://nextplusplus.github.io/TAT-DQA/.

Heterogeneous tabular data poses unique challenges in generative modelling due to its fundamentally different underlying data structure compared to homogeneous modalities, such as images and text. Although previous research has sought to adapt the successes of generative modelling in homogeneous modalities to the tabular domain, defining an effective generator for tabular data remains an open problem. One major reason is that the evaluation criteria inherited from other modalities often fail to adequately assess whether tabular generative models effectively capture or utilise the unique structural information encoded in tabular data. In this paper, we carefully examine the limitations of the prevailing evaluation framework and introduce TabStruct, a novel evaluation benchmark that positions structural fidelity as a core evaluation dimension. Specifically, TabStruct evaluates the alignment of causal structures in real and synthetic data, providing a direct measure of how effectively tabular generative models learn the structure of tabular data. Through extensive experiments using generators from eight categories on seven datasets with expert-validated causal graphical structures, we show that structural fidelity offers a task-independent, domain-agnostic evaluation dimension. Our findings highlight the importance of tabular data structure and offer practical guidance for developing more effective and robust tabular generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

Existing synthetic datasets (FigureQA, DVQA) for reasoning over plots do not contain variability in data labels, real-valued data, or complex reasoning questions. Consequently, proposed models for these datasets do not fully address the challenge of reasoning over plots. In particular, they assume that the answer comes either from a small fixed size vocabulary or from a bounding box within the image. However, in practice, this is an unrealistic assumption because many questions require reasoning and thus have real-valued answers which appear neither in a small fixed size vocabulary nor in the image. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap between existing datasets and real-world plots. Specifically, we propose PlotQA with 28.9 million question-answer pairs over 224,377 plots on data from real-world sources and questions based on crowd-sourced question templates. Further, 80.76% of the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) questions in PlotQA have answers that are not in a fixed vocabulary. Analysis of existing models on PlotQA reveals that they cannot deal with OOV questions: their overall accuracy on our dataset is in single digits. This is not surprising given that these models were not designed for such questions. As a step towards a more holistic model which can address fixed vocabulary as well as OOV questions, we propose a hybrid approach: Specific questions are answered by choosing the answer from a fixed vocabulary or by extracting it from a predicted bounding box in the plot, while other questions are answered with a table question-answering engine which is fed with a structured table generated by detecting visual elements from the image. On the existing DVQA dataset, our model has an accuracy of 58%, significantly improving on the highest reported accuracy of 46%. On PlotQA, our model has an accuracy of 22.52%, which is significantly better than state of the art models.

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. We introduce for the first time the assessment of LLMs' performance on image-based table representations. Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, demonstrating the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. Our study provides insights into the effective use of LLMs on table-related tasks.

Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.

Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction to tackle many table understanding tasks, such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Compared with generic reasoning, table-based reasoning requires the extraction of underlying semantics from both free-form questions and semi-structured tabular data. Chain-of-Thought and its similar approaches incorporate the reasoning chain in the form of textual context, but it is still an open question how to effectively leverage tabular data in the reasoning chain. We propose the Chain-of-Table framework, where tabular data is explicitly used in the reasoning chain as a proxy for intermediate thoughts. Specifically, we guide LLMs using in-context learning to iteratively generate operations and update the table to represent a tabular reasoning chain. LLMs can therefore dynamically plan the next operation based on the results of the previous ones. This continuous evolution of the table forms a chain, showing the reasoning process for a given tabular problem. The chain carries structured information of the intermediate results, enabling more accurate and reliable predictions. Chain-of-Table achieves new state-of-the-art performance on WikiTQ, FeTaQA, and TabFact benchmarks across multiple LLM choices.

Traditional cooking recipes follow a structure which can be modelled very well if the rules and semantics of the different sections of the recipe text are analyzed and represented accurately. We propose a structure that can accurately represent the recipe as well as a pipeline to infer the best representation of the recipe in this uniform structure. The Ingredients section in a recipe typically lists down the ingredients required and corresponding attributes such as quantity, temperature, and processing state. This can be modelled by defining these attributes and their values. The physical entities which make up a recipe can be broadly classified into utensils, ingredients and their combinations that are related by cooking techniques. The instruction section lists down a series of events in which a cooking technique or process is applied upon these utensils and ingredients. We model these relationships in the form of tuples. Thus, using a combination of these methods we model cooking recipe in the dataset RecipeDB to show the efficacy of our method. This mined information model can have several applications which include translating recipes between languages, determining similarity between recipes, generation of novel recipes and estimation of the nutritional profile of recipes. For the purpose of recognition of ingredient attributes, we train the Named Entity Relationship (NER) models and analyze the inferences with the help of K-Means clustering. Our model presented with an F1 score of 0.95 across all datasets. We use a similar NER tagging model for labelling cooking techniques (F1 score = 0.88) and utensils (F1 score = 0.90) within the instructions section. Finally, we determine the temporal sequence of relationships between ingredients, utensils and cooking techniques for modeling the instruction steps.

Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have markedly enhanced the interpretation and processing of tabular data, introducing previously unimaginable capabilities. Despite these achievements, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when applied in industrial scenarios, particularly due to the increased complexity of reasoning required with real-world tabular data, underscoring a notable disparity between academic benchmarks and practical applications. To address this discrepancy, we conduct a detailed investigation into the application of tabular data in industrial scenarios and propose a comprehensive and complex benchmark TableBench, including 18 fields within four major categories of table question answering (TableQA) capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce TableLLM, trained on our meticulously constructed training set TableInstruct, achieving comparable performance with GPT-3.5. Massive experiments conducted on TableBench indicate that both open-source and proprietary LLMs still have significant room for improvement to meet real-world demands, where the most advanced model, GPT-4, achieves only a modest score compared to humans.

Structure information is critical for understanding the semantics of text-rich images, such as documents, tables, and charts. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Document Understanding are equipped with text recognition ability but lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images. In this work, we emphasize the importance of structure information in Visual Document Understanding and propose the Unified Structure Learning to boost the performance of MLLMs. Our Unified Structure Learning comprises structure-aware parsing tasks and multi-grained text localization tasks across 5 domains: document, webpage, table, chart, and natural image. To better encode structure information, we design a simple and effective vision-to-text module H-Reducer, which can not only maintain the layout information but also reduce the length of visual features by merging horizontal adjacent patches through convolution, enabling the LLM to understand high-resolution images more efficiently. Furthermore, by constructing structure-aware text sequences and multi-grained pairs of texts and bounding boxes for publicly available text-rich images, we build a comprehensive training set DocStruct4M to support structure learning. Finally, we construct a small but high-quality reasoning tuning dataset DocReason25K to trigger the detailed explanation ability in the document domain. Our model DocOwl 1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks, improving the SOTA performance of MLLMs with a 7B LLM by more than 10 points in 5/10 benchmarks. Our codes, models, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/DocOwl1.5.

To overcome the limitations and challenges of current automatic table data annotation methods and random table data synthesis approaches, we propose a novel method for synthesizing annotation data specifically designed for table recognition. This method utilizes the structure and content of existing complex tables, facilitating the efficient creation of tables that closely replicate the authentic styles found in the target domain. By leveraging the actual structure and content of tables from Chinese financial announcements, we have developed the first extensive table annotation dataset in this domain. We used this dataset to train several recent deep learning-based end-to-end table recognition models. Additionally, we have established the inaugural benchmark for real-world complex tables in the Chinese financial announcement domain, using it to assess the performance of models trained on our synthetic data, thereby effectively validating our method's practicality and effectiveness. Furthermore, we applied our synthesis method to augment the FinTabNet dataset, extracted from English financial announcements, by increasing the proportion of tables with multiple spanning cells to introduce greater complexity. Our experiments show that models trained on this augmented dataset achieve comprehensive improvements in performance, especially in the recognition of tables with multiple spanning cells.

Currently, a substantial volume of document data exists in an unstructured format, encompassing Portable Document Format (PDF) files and images. Extracting information from these documents presents formidable challenges due to diverse table styles, complex forms, and the inclusion of different languages. Several open-source toolkits, such as Camelot, Plumb a PDF (pdfnumber), and Paddle Paddle Structure V2 (PP-StructureV2), have been developed to facilitate table extraction from PDFs or images. However, each toolkit has its limitations. Camelot and pdfnumber can solely extract tables from digital PDFs and cannot handle image-based PDFs and pictures. On the other hand, PP-StructureV2 can comprehensively extract image-based PDFs and tables from pictures. Nevertheless, it lacks the ability to differentiate between diverse application scenarios, such as wired tables and wireless tables, digital PDFs, and image-based PDFs. To address these issues, we have introduced the PDF table extraction (PdfTable) toolkit. This toolkit integrates numerous open-source models, including seven table recognition models, four Optical character recognition (OCR) recognition tools, and three layout analysis models. By refining the PDF table extraction process, PdfTable achieves adaptability across various application scenarios. We substantiate the efficacy of the PdfTable toolkit through verification on a self-labeled wired table dataset and the open-source wireless Publicly Table Reconition Dataset (PubTabNet). The PdfTable code will available on Github: https://github.com/CycloneBoy/pdf_table.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

The information in tables can be an important complement to text, making table-based question answering (QA) systems of great value. The intrinsic complexity of handling tables often adds an extra burden to both model design and data annotation. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple table-based QA model with minimal annotation effort. Motivated by the fact that table-based QA requires both alignment between questions and tables and the ability to perform complicated reasoning over multiple table elements, we propose an omnivorous pretraining approach that consumes both natural and synthetic data to endow models with these respective abilities. Specifically, given freely available tables, we leverage retrieval to pair them with relevant natural sentences for mask-based pretraining, and synthesize NL questions by converting SQL sampled from tables for pretraining with a QA loss. We perform extensive experiments in both few-shot and full settings, and the results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our model OmniTab, with the best multitasking approach achieving an absolute gain of 16.2% and 2.7% in 128-shot and full settings respectively, also establishing a new state-of-the-art on WikiTableQuestions. Detailed ablations and analyses reveal different characteristics of natural and synthetic data, shedding light on future directions in omnivorous pretraining. Code, pretraining data, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/OmniTab.

Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (e.g. graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.

The task of condensing large chunks of textual information into concise and structured tables has gained attention recently due to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential benefit for downstream tasks, such as text summarization and text mining. Previous approaches often generate tables that directly replicate information from the text, limiting their applicability in broader contexts, as text-to-table generation in real-life scenarios necessitates information extraction, reasoning, and integration. However, there is a lack of both datasets and methodologies towards this task. In this paper, we introduce LiveSum, a new benchmark dataset created for generating summary tables of competitions based on real-time commentary texts. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, and additionally propose a novel pipeline called T^3(Text-Tuple-Table) to improve their performances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LLMs still struggle with this task even after fine-tuning, while our approach can offer substantial performance gains without explicit training. Further analyses demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization abilities, surpassing previous approaches on several other text-to-table datasets. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LiveSum-TTT.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

Table Extraction (TE) consists in extracting tables from PDF documents, in a structured format which can be automatically processed. While numerous TE tools exist, the variety of methods and techniques makes it difficult for users to choose an appropriate one. We propose a novel benchmark for assessing end-to-end TE methods (from PDF to the final table). We contribute an analysis of TE evaluation metrics, and the design of a rigorous evaluation process, which allows scoring each TE sub-task as well as end-to-end TE, and captures model uncertainty. Along with a prior dataset, our benchmark comprises two new heterogeneous datasets of 37k samples. We run our benchmark on diverse models, including off-the-shelf libraries, software tools, large vision language models, and approaches based on computer vision. The results demonstrate that TE remains challenging: current methods suffer from a lack of generalizability when facing heterogeneous data, and from limitations in robustness and interpretability.

The existing literature on deep learning for tabular data proposes a wide range of novel architectures and reports competitive results on various datasets. However, the proposed models are usually not properly compared to each other and existing works often use different benchmarks and experiment protocols. As a result, it is unclear for both researchers and practitioners what models perform best. Additionally, the field still lacks effective baselines, that is, the easy-to-use models that provide competitive performance across different problems. In this work, we perform an overview of the main families of DL architectures for tabular data and raise the bar of baselines in tabular DL by identifying two simple and powerful deep architectures. The first one is a ResNet-like architecture which turns out to be a strong baseline that is often missing in prior works. The second model is our simple adaptation of the Transformer architecture for tabular data, which outperforms other solutions on most tasks. Both models are compared to many existing architectures on a diverse set of tasks under the same training and tuning protocols. We also compare the best DL models with Gradient Boosted Decision Trees and conclude that there is still no universally superior solution.

It is well-established that large, diverse datasets play a pivotal role in the performance of modern AI systems for text and image modalities. However, there are no datasets for tabular data of comparable size and diversity to those available for text and images. Thus we present "TabLib'', a compilation of 627 million tables totaling 69 TiB, along with 867B tokens of context. TabLib was extracted from numerous file formats, including CSV, HTML, SQLite, PDF, Excel, and others, sourced from GitHub and Common Crawl. The size and diversity of TabLib offer considerable promise in the table modality, reminiscent of the original promise of foundational datasets for text and images, such as The Pile and LAION.

Evaluating tabular generators remains a challenging problem, as the unique causal structural prior of heterogeneous tabular data does not lend itself to intuitive human inspection. Recent work has introduced structural fidelity as a tabular-specific evaluation dimension to assess whether synthetic data complies with the causal structures of real data. However, existing benchmarks often neglect the interplay between structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions, thus failing to provide a holistic understanding of model performance. Moreover, they are typically limited to toy datasets, as quantifying existing structural fidelity metrics requires access to ground-truth causal structures, which are rarely available for real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that jointly considers structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions. We introduce a new evaluation metric, global utility, which enables the assessment of structural fidelity even in the absence of ground-truth causal structures. In addition, we present TabStruct, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark offering large-scale quantitative analysis on 13 tabular generators from nine distinct categories, across 29 datasets. Our results demonstrate that global utility provides a task-independent, domain-agnostic lens for tabular generator performance. We release the TabStruct benchmark suite, including all datasets, evaluation pipelines, and raw results. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

Tabular data is arguably one of the most commonly used data structures in various practical domains, including finance, healthcare and e-commerce. The inherent heterogeneity allows tabular data to store rich information. However, based on a recently published tabular benchmark, we can see deep neural networks still fall behind tree-based models on tabular datasets. In this paper, we propose Trompt--which stands for Tabular Prompt--a novel architecture inspired by prompt learning of language models. The essence of prompt learning is to adjust a large pre-trained model through a set of prompts outside the model without directly modifying the model. Based on this idea, Trompt separates the learning strategy of tabular data into two parts. The first part, analogous to pre-trained models, focus on learning the intrinsic information of a table. The second part, analogous to prompts, focus on learning the variations among samples. Trompt is evaluated with the benchmark mentioned above. The experimental results demonstrate that Trompt outperforms state-of-the-art deep neural networks and is comparable to tree-based models.

Tabular data contains rich structural semantics and plays a crucial role in organizing and manipulating information. To better capture these structural semantics, this paper introduces the HybrId-modal Preference oPtimizatiOn (HIPPO) model, which represents tables using both text and image, and optimizes MLLMs to effectively learn more comprehensive table information from these multiple modalities. Specifically, HIPPO samples model responses from hybrid-modal table representations and designs a modality-consistent sampling strategy to enhance response diversity and mitigate modality bias during DPO training. Experimental results on table question answering and table fact verification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of HIPPO, achieving a 4% improvement over various table reasoning models. Further analysis reveals that HIPPO not only enhances reasoning abilities based on unimodal table representations but also facilitates the extraction of crucial and distinct semantics from different modal representations. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/HIPPO.

Tabular data -- structured, heterogeneous, spreadsheet-style data with rows and columns -- is widely used in practice across many domains. However, while recent foundation models have reduced the need for developing task-specific datasets and predictors in domains such as language modeling and computer vision, this transfer learning paradigm has not had similar impact in the tabular domain. In this work, we seek to narrow this gap and present TabuLa-8B, a language model for tabular prediction. We define a process for extracting a large, high-quality training dataset from the TabLib corpus, proposing methods for tabular data filtering and quality control. Using the resulting dataset, which comprises over 1.6B rows from 3.1M unique tables, we fine-tune a Llama 3-8B large language model (LLM) for tabular data prediction (classification and binned regression) using a novel packing and attention scheme for tabular prediction. Through evaluation across a test suite of 329 datasets, we find that TabuLa-8B has zero-shot accuracy on unseen tables that is over 15 percentage points (pp) higher than random guessing, a feat that is not possible with existing state-of-the-art tabular prediction models (e.g. XGBoost, TabPFN). In the few-shot setting (1-32 shots), without any fine-tuning on the target datasets, TabuLa-8B is 5-15 pp more accurate than XGBoost and TabPFN models that are explicitly trained on equal, or even up to 16x more data. We release our model, code, and data along with the publication of this paper.

Corpora that contain tabular data such as WebTables are a vital resource for the academic community. Essentially, they are the backbone of any modern research in information management. They are used for various tasks of data extraction, knowledge base construction, question answering, column semantic type detection and many other. Such corpora are useful not only as a source of data, but also as a base for building test datasets. So far, there were no such corpora for the Russian language and this seriously hindered research in the aforementioned areas. In this paper, we present the first corpus of Web tables created specifically out of Russian language material. It was built via a special toolkit we have developed to crawl the Russian Wikipedia. Both the corpus and the toolkit are open-source and publicly available. Finally, we present a short study that describes Russian Wikipedia tables and their statistics.

Tabular reasoning involves multi-step information extraction and logical inference over tabular data. While recent advances have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over structured tables, such high-quality textual representations are often unavailable in real-world settings, where tables typically appear as images. In this paper, we tackle the task of tabular reasoning from table images, leveraging privileged structured information available during training to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The key challenges lie in the complexity of accurately aligning structured information with visual representations, and in effectively transferring structured reasoning skills to MLLMs despite the input modality gap. To address these, we introduce TabUlar Reasoning with Bridged infOrmation ({\sc Turbo}), a new framework for multimodal tabular reasoning with privileged structured tables. {\sc Turbo} benefits from a structure-aware reasoning trace generator based on DeepSeek-R1, contributing to high-quality modality-bridged data. On this basis, {\sc Turbo} repeatedly generates and selects the advantageous reasoning paths, further enhancing the model's tabular reasoning ability. Experimental results demonstrate that, with limited (9k) data, {\sc Turbo} achieves state-of-the-art performance (+7.2% vs. previous SOTA) across multiple datasets.

Pretrained deep-learning models are the go-to solution for images or text. However, for tabular data the standard is still to train tree-based models. Pre-training or transfer is a huge challenge as in general tables have columns about different quantities and naming conventions that vary vastly across sources. Data integration tackles correspondences across multiple sources: schema matching for columns, and entity matching for entries. We propose a neural architecture that does not need such matches. As a result, we can pretrain it on background data that has not been matched. The architecture - CARTE for Context Aware Representation of Table Entries - uses a graph representation of tabular (or relational) data to process tables with different columns, string embeddings of entries and columns names to model an open vocabulary, and a graph-attentional network to contextualize entries with column names and neighboring entries. An extensive benchmark shows that CARTE facilitates learning, outperforming a solid set of baselines including the best tree-based models. CARTE also enables joint learning across tables with unmatched columns, enhancing a small table with bigger ones. CARTE opens the door to large pretrained models embarking information for tabular data.

TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).

Table understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been extensively studied through the task of question-answering (QA) over tables. Typically, only a small part of the whole table is relevant to derive the answer for a given question. The irrelevant parts act as noise and are distracting information, resulting in sub-optimal performance due to the vulnerability of LLMs to noise. To mitigate this, we propose CABINET (Content RelevAnce-Based NoIse ReductioN for TablE QuesTion-Answering) - a framework to enable LLMs to focus on relevant tabular data by suppressing extraneous information. CABINET comprises an Unsupervised Relevance Scorer (URS), trained differentially with the QA LLM, that weighs the table content based on its relevance to the input question before feeding it to the question-answering LLM (QA LLM). To further aid the relevance scorer, CABINET employs a weakly supervised module that generates a parsing statement describing the criteria of rows and columns relevant to the question and highlights the content of corresponding table cells. CABINET significantly outperforms various tabular LLM baselines, as well as GPT3-based in-context learning methods, is more robust to noise, maintains outperformance on tables of varying sizes, and establishes new SoTA performance on WikiTQ, FeTaQA, and WikiSQL datasets. We release our code and datasets at https://github.com/Sohanpatnaik106/CABINET_QA.