A-Paper-List-of-Awesome-Tabular-LLMs

Different types of tables are widely used to store and present information. To automatically process numerous tables and gain valuable insights, researchers have proposed a series of deep-learning models for various table-based tasks, e.g., table question answering (TQA), table-to-text (T2T), text-to-sql (NL2SQL) and table fact verification (TFV). Recently, the emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) and more powerful Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened up new possibilities for processing the tabular data, i.e., we can use one general model to process diverse tables and fulfill different tabular tasks based on the user natural language instructions. We refer to these LLMs speciallized for tabular tasks as Tabular LLMs. In this repository, we collect a paper list about recent Tabular (M)LLMs and divide them into the following categories based on their key idea.

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Table of Contents:

1. Survey of Tabular LLMs and table understanding
2. Prompting LLMs for different tabular tasks, e.g., in-context learning, prompt engineering and integrating external tools.
3. Training LLMs for better table understanding ability, e.g., training existing LLMs by instruction fine-tuning or post-pretraining.
4. Developing agents for processing tabular data, e.g., devolping copilot for processing excel tables.
5. Empirical study or benchmarks for evaluating LLMs' table understanding ability, e.g., exploring the influence of various table types or table formats.
6. Multimodal table understanding, e.g., training MLLMs to understand diverse table images and textual user requests.

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Task Names and Abbreviations:

Task Names	Abbreviations	Task Descriptions
Table Question Answering	TQA	Answering questions based on the table(s), e.g., answer look-up or computation questions about table(s).
Table-to-Text	Table2Text or T2T	Generate a text based on the table(s), e.g., generate a analysis report given a financial statement.
Text-to-Table	Text2Table	Generate structured tables based on input text, e.g., generate a statistical table based on the game summary.
Table Fact Verification	TFV	Judging if a statement is true or false (or not enough evidence) based on the table(s)
Text-to-SQL	NL2SQL	Generate a SQL statement to answer the user question based on the database schema
Tabular Mathematical Reasoning	TMR	Solving mathematical reasoning problems based on the table(s), e.g., solve math word problems related to a table
Table-and-Text Question Answering	TAT-QA	Answering questions based on both table(s) and their related texts, e.g., answer questions given wikipedia tables and their surrounding texts.
Table Interpretation	TI	Interpreting basic table content and structure information, e.g., column type annotation, entity linking, relation extraction, cell type classification et al.
Table Augmentation	TA	Augmenting existing tables with new data, e.g., schema augmentation, row population, et al.

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1. Survey of Tabular LLMs and Table Understanding

Title	Conference	Date	Pages
Large Language Model for Table Processing: A Survey	arxiv	2024-02-04	9
A Survey of Table Reasoning with Large Language Models	arxiv	2024-02-13	9
Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey	arxiv	2024-03-01	41
Transformers for Tabular Data Representation: A Survey of Models and Applications	TACL 2023		23
Table Pre-training: A Survey on Model Architectures, Pre-training Objectives, and Downstream Tasks	IJCAI 2022	2022-01-24	15

2. Prompting LLMs for Different Tabular Tasks

Title	Conference	Date	Task	Code
Improving Factual Accuracy of Neural Table-to-Text Output by Addressing Input Problems in ToTTo	NAACL 2024	2024-04-05	T2T
TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition	NAACL 2024		TQA,TFV
E5: Zero-shot Hierarchical Table Analysis using Augmented LLMs via Explain, Extract, Execute, Exhibit and Extrapolate	NAACL 2024		TQA on hierarchical tables	Github
OpenTE: Open-Structure Table Extraction From Text	ICASSP 2024		Text-to-Table Extraction
On Linearizing Structured Data in Encoder-Decoder Language Models: Insights from Text-to-SQL	NAACL 2024	2024-04-03	NL2SQL
MFORT-QA: Multi-hop Few-shot Open Rich Table Question Answering	arxiv	2024-03-28	TQA
OpenTab: Advancing Large Language Models as Open-domain Table Reasoners	ICLR 2024	2024-02-22	TQA,TFV	Github
CABINET: Content Relevance based Noise Reduction for Table Question Answering	ICLR 2024	2024-02-02	TQA
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion	arxiv	2024-01-24	TQA	Github
Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding	ICLR 2024	2024-01-09	TQA,TFV
TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning	arxiv	2023-12-14	TQA,TAT-QA,TFV,T2T	Github
Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers	EMNLP 2023	2023-12-13	TQA
API-Assisted Code Generation for Question Answering on Varied Table Structures	EMNLP 2023	2023-10-23	TQA
TableQAKit: A Comprehensive and Practical Toolkit for Table-based Question Answering	arxiv	2023-10-23	TQA,NL2SQL	Github
Enhancing Few-shot Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies	arxiv	2023-05-21	NL2SQL
StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data	EMNLP 2023	2023-05-16	TQA, TFV	Github
Chameleon：Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models	NIPS 2023	2023-04-19	TMR	Github
Generate, Transform, Answer: Question Specific Tool Synthesis for Tabular Data	EMNLP 2023	2023-03-17	TQA,NL2SQL
DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	SIGMOD 2024	2023-03-12	Table Transformation
Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers：Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning	SIGIR 2023	2023-01-13	TQA, TFV	Github
Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks	TMLR 2023	2022-11-22	TMR, TAT-QA	Github
Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners	EACL 2023 Findings	2022-10-13	TQA, TFV	Github
Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages	ICLR 2023	2022-10-06	TQA, TFV	Github
Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoning	ICLR 2023	2022-09-29	TMR (Tabular Mathematical Reasoning)	Github

3. Training LLMs for Better Table Understanding Ability

Title	Conference	Date	Task	LLM Backbone	Code
Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models for Predictive Tabular Tasks in Data Science	arxiv	2024-03-29	Predictive Tabular Tasks	Llama2 7B	HuggingFace
HGT: Leveraging Heterogeneous Graph-enhanced Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Table Understanding	arxiv	2024-03-28	TI,TQA	Vicuna-1.5 7B
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios	arxiv	2024-03-28	Table Manipulation	CodeLlama 7B, 13B	Github
StructLM: Towards Building Generalist Models for Structured Knowledge Grounding	CoLM 2024	2024-02-26	TQA,TFV,T2T,NL2SQL	CodeLlama 7B-34B	Github
TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables	NAACL 2024	2023-11-15	TQA,TFV,T2T,TA,TI	Llama2 7B	Github
HELLaMA: LLaMA-based Table to Text Generation by Highlighting the Important Evidence	arxiv	2023-11-15	T2T	Llama2 7B-13B
Table-GPT: Table-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	arxiv	2023-10-13	All kinds of table task	GPT-3.5, ChatGPT

Pre-trained Tabular Language Models (non-LLM)

Title	Conference	Date	Task	Code
HYTREL: Hypergraph-enhanced Tabular Data Representation Learning	NIPS 2023	2023-07-14	TA, TI	Github
FLAME: A small language model for spreadsheet formulas	AAAI 2024	2023-01-31	Generating Excel Formulas	Github

4. Developing Agents for Processing Tabular Data

Title	Conference	Date	Task	Code
SheetAgent: A Generalist Agent for Spreadsheet Reasoning and Manipulation via Large Language Models	arxiv	2024-03-06	Manipulating Excels with LLM	Github
EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records	arxiv	2024-01-13	TQA	Github
InfiAgent-DABench: Evaluating Agents on Data Analysis Tasks	arxiv	2024-01-10	Data Analysis	Github
DB-GPT: Empowering Database Interactions with Private Large Language Models	arxiv	2023-12-29	Data Analysis	Github
ReAcTable: Enhancing ReAct for Table Question Answering	arxiv	2023-10-01	TQA
SheetCopilot: Bringing Software Productivity to the Next Level through Large Language Models	NIPS 2023	2023-05-30	Manipulating Excels with LLM	Github
TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPT	arxiv	2023-07-17	Manipulating CSV table with LLM

5. Empirical Study or Benchmarks for Evaluating LLMs' Table Understanding Ability

Title	Conference	Date	Task	Code
Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models	NAACL 2024	2023-12-27	TQA
On the Robustness of Language Models for Tabular Question Answering	arxiv	2024-06-18	TQA
FREB-TQA: A Fine-Grained Robustness Evaluation Benchmark for Table Question Answering	NAACL 2024	2024-04-29	TQA
How Robust are the Tabular QA Models for Scientific Tables? A Study using Customized Dataset	arxiv	2024-03-20	TQA
InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel	Findings of EMNLP 2023	2023-10-23	Excel operations	Github
Tabular Representation, Noisy Operators, and Impacts on Table Structure Understanding Tasks in LLMs	arxiv	2023-10-16	Fact-Finding Tasks, Transformation Tasks
Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of LLMs in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios	EMNLP 2023	2023-05-24	T2T	Github
TABLET: Learning From Instructions For Tabular Data	arxiv	2023-04-25		Github
Table Meets LLM: Can Large Language Models Understand Structured Table Data? A Benchmark and Empirical Study	WSDM 2024	2023-05-22	TQA,TFV,T2T
Evaluating the Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models	arxiv	2022-03-15	NL2SQL
A comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT's zero-shot Text-to-SQL capability	arxiv	2023-03-12	NL2SQL	Github
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations	ACL 2023	2023-06-25	TQA	Github

6. Multimodal Table Understanding

Title	Conference	Date	Task	Code
TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy	arxiv	2024-06-03	TQA,TI
TableVQA-Bench: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark on Multiple Table Domains	arxiv	2024-04-30	TQA, TFV	Github
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs	ACL 2024	2024-02-19	TQA,TFV,T2T
Multimodal Table Understanding	ACL 2024	2024-02-15	TQA, TFV, T2T, TI, TAT-QA, TMR	Github