Due to limited time, I cannot keep track of every new paper very promptly, please feel free to submit a Pull Request to add your papers or submit Issues to remind me, I will add them ASAP. Let's maintain this paper list collaboratively. 🤝

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 tabular data, e.g., devolping copilot for processing excel tables.
5. RAG with tabular data, e.g., devolping RAG systems for understanding long tables.
6. Empirical study for evaluating LLMs' table understanding ability, e.g., exploring the influence of various table types or table formats.
7. Multimodal table understanding, e.g., training MLLMs to understand diverse table images and textual user requests.
8. Table Understanding datasets and benchmarks, e.g., valuable datasets and benchmarks for model training and evaluation.
9. Evaluation Metrics for Table Understanding, e.g., devising better evaluation method for table understanding.

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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	Source	Date	Pages
Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluation	arxiv	2025-10-28	25
Toward Real-World Table Agents: Capabilities, Workflows, and Design Principles for LLM-based Table Intelligence	arxiv	2025-07-14	34
Language Modeling on Tabular Data: A Survey of Foundations, Techniques and Evolution	arxiv	2024-08-20	49
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	Source	Date	Task	Code
Causality Meets the Table: Debiasing LLMs for Faithful TableQA via Front-Door Intervention	NIPS 2025		Debiasing TQA
Map&Make: Schema Guided Text to Table Generation	ACL 2025	2025-05-29	Text-to-Table
Plugging Schema Graph into Multi-Table QA: A Human-Guided Framework for Reducing LLM Reliance	EMNLP 2025 Findings		Multi-Table QA	Github
GRIT: Guided Relational Integration for Efficient Multi-Table Understanding	EMNLP 2025		Multi-Table QA
RoT: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Iterative Row-Wise Traversals	EMNLP 2025	2025-05-21	TQA
Weaver: Interweaving SQL and LLM for Table Reasoning	EMNLP 2025	2025-05-25	TQA,TFV
Map&Make: Schema Guided Text to Table Generation	ACL 2025	2025-05-29	Text2Table
Triples as the Key: Structuring Makes Decomposition and Verification Easier in LLM-based TableQA	ICLR 2025	-	TQA
Piece of Table: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Selecting Subtables in Table Question Answering	arxiv	2024-12-10	TQA
Tree-of-Table: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Enhanced Large-Scale Table Understanding	arxiv	2024-11-13	TQA,TFV,T2T
Retrieval & Fine-Tuning for In-Context Tabular Models	NIPS 2024	2024-06-07	Machine learning tasks with tabular data
GraphOTTER: Evolving LLM-based Graph Reasoning for Complex Table Question Answering	COLING 2025	2024-12-02	TQA	Github
PoTable: Programming Standardly on Table-based Reasoning Like a Human Analyst	arxiv	2024-12-05	TQA, TFV
Unveiling Implicit Table Knowledge with Question-Then-Pinpoint Reasoner for Insightful Table Summarization	EMNLP 2024 Findings	2024-06-18	Table Summarization
TKGT: Redefinition and A New Way of Text-to-Table Tasks Based on Real World Demands and Knowledge Graphs Augmented LLMs	EMNLP 2024		Text2Table
Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction	EMNLP 2024	2024-04-22	Text2Table	Github
TART: An Open-Source Tool-Augmented Framework for Explainable Table-based Reasoning	arxiv	2024-09-18	TQA	Github
SynTQA: Synergistic Table-based Question Answering via Mixture of Text-to-SQL and E2E TQA	EMNLP 2024	2024-09-25	TQA
FLEXTAF: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Flexible Tabular Formats	arxiv	2024-08-16	TQA, TFV	Github
Learning Relational Decomposition of Queries for Question Answering from Tables	ACL 2024		TQA
TaPERA: Enhancing Faithfulness and Interpretability in Long-Form Table QA by Content Planning and Execution-based Reasoning	ACL 2024		TQA
Enhancing Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Semi-structured Tables	arxiv	2024-07-22	Temporal TQA
ALTER: Augmentation for Large-Table-Based Reasoning	arxiv	2024-07-03	TQA	Github
TrustUQA: A Trustful Framework for Unified Structured Data Question Answering	arxiv	2024-06-27	TQA
Adapting Knowledge for Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation	arxiv	2024-03-27	T2T
Graph Reasoning Enhanced Language Models for Text-to-SQL	SIGIR 2024		NL2SQL
NormTab: Improving Symbolic Reasoning in LLMs Through Tabular Data Normalization	arxiv	2024-06-25	TQA,TFV
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	EMNLP 2025 Findings	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	EMNLP 2024 Findings	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

3.1 Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) for Tabular LLMs

Title	Source	Date	Task	LLM Backbone	Code
TabFlash: Efficient Table Understanding with Progressive Question Conditioning and Token Focusing	AAAI 2026	2025-11-17	Multimodal Table Understanding	InternVL-2.5 1B and 3B	Github
Table as a Modality for Large Language Models	NIPS 2025		TQA	Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3.1-8B
QuASAR: A Question-Driven Structure-Aware Approach for Table-to-Text Generation	ACL 2025		Table-to-text	T5-Base	Github
RelationalCoder: Rethinking Complex Tables via Programmatic Relational Transformation	ACL 2025		TQA with hierarchical tables		Github
Table-LLM-Specialist: Language Model Specialists for Tables using Iterative Generator-Validator Fine-tuning	EMNLP 2025	2024-10-16	Classification table tasks like Schema matching and Generative table tasks like TQA	GPT-3.5 and GPT-4	Github
TableDreamer: Progressive and Weakness-guided Data Synthesis from Scratch for Table Instruction Tuning	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-06-10	Synthesize diverse table instruction tuning data	Llama3.1-8B-Instruct	Github
TableMoE: Neuro-Symbolic Routing for Structured Expert Reasoning in Multimodal Table Understanding	arxiv	2025-06-26	Multimodal Table Understanding	LLaMA 3.1–8B–Instruct, Qwen2.5–VL–7B–Instruct	Github
TableLoRA: Low-rank Adaptation on Table Structure Understanding for Large Language Models	ACL 2025	2025-03-06	TQA,TFV	DeepSeek, Llama2/3 with a specially designed LoRA module for table understanding
RePanda: Pandas-powered Tabular Verification and Reasoning	arxiv	2025-03-14	TFV	DeepSeek-coder-7B-instruct-v1.5
LaTeXNet: A Specialized Model for Converting Visual Tables and Equations to LaTeX Code	arxiv	ICASSP 2025	Table-image-to-LaTeX
General Table Question Answering via Answer-Formula Joint Generation	arxiv	2025-03-16	TQA	Llama3.1, Qwen2.5-coder
Rethinking Table Instruction Tuning	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-01-24	TQA,TFV	Enhance OOD and general capacity of tabular LLMs
Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Text and Table: A Case Study on NL2SQL	ICLR 2025	-	NL2SQL	LLMs with a specially trained table encoders.
TableGPT2: A Large Multimodal Model with Tabular Data Integration	arxiv	2024-11-04	TQA, TFV, et al.	Qwen2.5 model family with a special pre-trained table encoder.	Github
Large Scale Transfer Learning for Tabular Data via Language Modeling	NIPS 2024	2024-06-17	tabular data prediction (classification and binned regression)	Llama 3-8B
ProTrix: Building Models for Planning and Reasoning over Tables with Sentence Context	EMNLP 2024 Findings	2024-03-04	TQA, TFV	Llama-2	Github
UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition	EMNLP 2024 Findings	2024-09-20	Table Recognition
Table Question Answering for Low-resourced Indic Languages	EMNLP 2024	2024-10-04	Indian TQA	mBART	Github
TabMoE: A General Framework for Diverse Table-Based Reasoning with Mixture-of-Experts	Mathematics	2024-08-16	TQA, TFV, T2T	BART
rLLM: Relational Table Learning with LLMs	arxiv	2024-07-29	multi-table joint learning tasks	a PyTorch library designed for Relational Table Learning (RTL) with Large Language Models (LLMs).	Github
Mambular: A Sequential Model for Tabular Deep Learning	arxiv	2024-08-12	ML Classification and Regression tasks like California Housing	Mamba	Github
MambaTab: A Plug-and-Play Model for Learning Tabular Data	MIPR 2024	2024-01-16	ML Classification tasks	Mamba
SpreadsheetLLM: Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models	arxiv	2024-07-12	Excel Manipulation
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	ACL 2025 Findings	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
TAT-LLM: A Specialized Language Model for Discrete Reasoning over Tabular and Textual Data	arxiv	2024-01-24	TQA	Llama2 7B, 13B, 70B	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	TQA	GPT-3.5, ChatGPT

3.2 Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Tabular LLM

Title	Source	Date	Task	LLM Backbone	Code
Table2LaTeX-RL: High-Fidelity LaTeX Code Generation from Table Images via Reinforced Multimodal Language Models	NIPS 2025	2025-09-22	Table Recognition (table-image-to-latex)	InternVL2-1B, Qwen2.5-VL-3B	Github
Exploring Generative Process Reward Modeling for Semi-Structured Data: A Case Study of Table Question Answering	arxiv	2025-10-23	Evalating current PRM for TQA
STaR: Towards Cognitive Table Reasoning via Slow-Thinking Large Language Models	arxiv	2025-11-14	TQA	Qwen3-0.5B/8B	Github
TaTToo: Tool-Grounded Thinking PRM for Test-Time Scaling in Tabular Reasoning	arxiv	2025-10-07	Building a better PRM for tabular task	Qwen-3-8B
Can GRPO Boost Complex Multimodal Table Understanding?	EMNLP 2025	2025-09-21	Multimodal Table Understanding	Qwen2-VL-7B
PPT: A Process-based Preference Learning Framework for Self Improving Table Question Answering Models	arxiv	2025-05-23	Qwen2.5-7B, Llama3.1-8B
Fortune: Formula-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Symbolic Table Reasoning in Language Models	arxiv	2025-05-29	TQA, TFV	Multiple LLMs
Reasoning-Table: Exploring Reinforcement Learning for Table Reasoning	arxiv	2025-06-02	TQA,TFV,T2T,NL2SQL	Qwen2.5-7B	Github
OpenTable-R1: A Reinforcement Learning Augmented Tool Agent for Open-Domain Table Question Answering	arxiv	2025-07-02	Open-Domain TQA		Github
Table-r1: Self-supervised and Reinforcement Learning for Program-based Table Reasoning in Small Language Models	arxiv	2025-06-06	TQA	Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Inst, LLaMA3.1-8B-Inst	Github
Table-R1: Inference-Time Scaling for Table Reasoning	EMNLP 2025	2025-05-29	TQA,TFV,T2T	Qwen2.5-7B	Github
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding	arxiv	2025-05-18	TQA	Multiple LLMs
HIPPO: Enhancing the Table Understanding Capability of Large Language Models through Hybrid-Modal Preference Optimization	arxiv	2025-02-24	TQA,TFV	MiniCPM-V-2.6 with DPO training	Github

3.3 Pre-trained Tabular Language Models (non-LLM)

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
Structural Deep Encoding for Table Question Answering	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-03-03	WTQ, WikiSQL
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 Understanding and Processing Tabular Data

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
TraceBack: Multi-Agent Decomposition for Fine-Grained Table Attribution	arxiv	2026-02-13	Fine-grained table attribution	Github
TabDSR: Decompose, Sanitize, and Reason for Complex Numerical Reasoning in Tabular Data	EMNLP 2025 Findings	2025-11-04	TQA
TST: A Schema-Based Top-Down and Dynamic-Aware Agent of Text-to-Table Tasks	ACL 2025		Text-to-Table	Github
Table-Critic: A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Criticism and Refinement in Table Reasoning	ACL 2025	2025-02-17	TQA,TFV	Github
Beyond Summaries: Multi-Agent Generation of Investment Reports with Text, Tables, and Charts	EMNLP 2025 Findings		Investment Reports Generation	Github
TALON: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Table Exploration and Question Answering	EMNLP 2025		TQA and Text2SQL like WTQ and BirdQA	Github
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. RAG with Tabular Data

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning	EMNLP 2025	2025-06-12	TQA	Github
HD-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Hybrid Documents Containing Text and Hierarchical Tables	arxiv	2025-04-13	TQA
GTR: Graph-Table-RAG for Cross-Table Question Answering	arxiv	2025-04-02	Cross-table Question Answering
TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models	NIPS 2024	2024-10-07	TQA for extremely long tables
Evaluation of Table Representations to Answer Questions from Tables in Documents : A Case Study using 3GPP Specifications	arxiv	2024-08-30	how to represent tables for better retrieval within RAG systems
THoRR: Complex Table Retrieval and Refinement for RAG	IR-RAG 2024 workshop		RAG with large and complex tables

6. Empirical Study for Evaluating LLMs' Table Understanding Ability

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
Evaluating language models as risk scores	NeurIPS 2024	2024-12-10	TQA	Github
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

7. Multimodal Table Understanding

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
Texts or Images? A Fine-grained Analysis on the Effectiveness of Input Representations and Models for Table Question Answering	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-05-20	TQA	Github
Compositional Condition Question Answering in Tabular Understanding	ICML 2025			Github
Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models with Layout Modality for Table Question Answering on Japanese Annual Securities Reports	IIAI AAI 2025	2025-05-23
TableMoE: Neuro-Symbolic Routing for Structured Expert Reasoning in Multimodal Table Understanding	arxiv	2025-06-26	Multimodal Table Understanding
Multimodal Tabular Reasoning with Privileged Structured Information	arxiv	2025-06-04
SynTab-LLaVA: Enhancing Multimodal Table Understanding with Decoupled Synthesis	CVPR 2025		Understanding table images
MMTBENCH: A Unified Benchmark for Complex Multimodal Table Reasoning	arxiv	2025-05-27	Complex Multimodal Table Reasoning
Does Table Source Matter? Benchmarking and Improving Multimodal Scientific Table Understanding and Reasoning	arxiv	2025-01-22	Understanding Scientific Table Images
Knowledge-Aware Reasoning over Multimodal Semi-structured Tables	EMNLP 2024 Findings	2024-08-25	Understanding table images with visual elements like symbols and icons
Leopard: A Vision Language Model For Text-Rich Multi-Image Tasks	arxiv	2024-10-02	Multi Table Image QA	Github
PixT3: Pixel-based Table-To-Text Generation	ACL 2024	2023-11-16	T2T	Github
TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy	NIPS 2024	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

8. Table Understanding Datasets and Benchmarks

8.1 Benchmarks

Title	Source	Date	Task	Data Volume	Domain	Table Type	Data and Code
TabReX : Tabular Referenceless eXplainable Evaluation	arxiv	2025-12-17	referenceless evaluation for generated tables	710 source tables and 9,120 perturbed instances (12 perturbations/table)	Multi-domain (finance, healthcare/clinical, sports, open-domain narrative, hierarchical tables)	Flat and hierarchical tables	Github
RUST-BENCH: Benchmarking LLM Reasoning on Unstructured Text within Structured Tables	arxiv	2025-11-06	Reasoning questions	7,966 questions and 2,031 tables	Scientic and Sports	Flat and complex tables	Github
UniDataBench: Evaluating Data Analytics Agents Across Structured and Unstructured Data	arxiv	2025-11-03	Data analysis	100 analytical tasks over 223 data files	user behavior, sales, business and so on	csv, database, txt, no sql
MMTU: A Massive Multi-Task Table Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark	NIPS 2025	2025-06-05	25 Tabular tasks	28,136 questions and 61,763 tables	Web tables, spreadsheets and database tables	Flat and complex tables	Github
WikiMixQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Question Answering over Tables and Charts	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-06-18	QA over over Tables and Charts	1,000 multiple-choice questions	diverse domains like Economy, Geography, History, Politics, Science, Sport		Github
TabXEval: Why this is a Bad Table? An eXhaustive Rubric for Table Evaluation	ACL 2025 Findings	2025-05-28	evaluate generated tables	50 reference tables + 250 perturbed tables (5 perturbations/table, 16 error types)	Multi-domain (finance, sports, knowledge-base / open-domain)	Flat tables with structural perturbations	Github
Are Large Language Models Ready for Multi-Turn Tabular Data Analysis?	ICML	2025-05-01	Multi-turn data analysis	5 common domains such as ATP Tennis and Credit Card	flat tables supporting Pandas operations	Github
GRI-QA: a Comprehensive Benchmark for Table Question Answering over Environmental Data	ACL 2025 Findings		TQA	4089 questions, 204 tables	environmental	flat and hierarchical tables	Github
2Columns1Row: A Russian Benchmark for Textual and Multimodal Table Understanding and Reasoning	EMNLP 2025 Findings		Textual and Multimodal TQA in Russian	28,800 instances
NeedleInATable: Exploring Long-Context Capability of Large Language Models towards Long-Structured Tables	NIPS 2025	2025-04-09	Cell lookup and locating	750 table and 287K test cases	Wikipedia, statistic reports, and annual reports of airline companies	Flat, hierarchical, horizontal	Github
LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains	EMNLP 2025 Findings		Long-table QA	5,950 QA instances spanning 7 table format, and input lengths up to 128K tokens, including multi-turn and multi-table settings	18 domains	flat tables	Github
Table-Text Alignment: Explaining Claim Verification Against Tables in Scientific Papers	EMNLP 2025 Findings	2025-06-12	scientific table-based verification	372 samples	scientic	flat	Github
SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering	EMNLP 2025	-	RAG over table and text data for Sports QA	3,000 QA pairs	Sports	flat table	Github
T2R-bench: A Benchmark for Generating Article-Level Reports from Real World Industrial Tables	EMNLP 2025	2025-08-27	Table2Reports	457 real-world industrial tables	19 industry domains	four table types	Github
MTabVQA: Evaluating Multi-Tabular Reasoning of Language Models in Visual Space	arxiv	2025-06-13	Multi-Tabular Reasoning	3,745 complex question-answer pairs			huggingface
TReB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Table Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models	arxiv	2025-06-23	26 table-related tasks such as data analysis	7,790 samples
TableEval: A Real-World Benchmark for Complex, Multilingual, and Multi-Structured Table Question Answering	EMNLP 2025	2025-06-11	Data Analysis, Information Retrieval, Numerical Analysis	617 tables and 2,325 QA pairs	financial reports, industry/stock research reports, academic papers and goverment reports	Flat, hierarchical and complex tables	Github
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis	ACL 2025	2025-06-19	Table analysis over complex tables	708 tables, 3,752 QA pairs	24 domains like economy, society, science	complex tables in image and textual format	Github
Automated Text-to-Table for Reasoning-Intensive Table QA: Pipeline Design and Benchmarking Insights	arxiv	2025-05-26	Text2Table				Github
MULTITAT: Benchmarking Multilingual Table-and-Text Question Answering	EMNLP 2025	2025-02-24	Multilingual Table-and-Text Question Answering	250 samples			Github
MT-RAIG: Novel Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Insight Generation over Multiple Tables	ACL 2025	2025-02-17	Insight Generation over Mulitple-Tables	19,563 tables and 18,532 questions	Tables from SPIDER and Wikipedia	Flat tables	Github
TransientTables: Evaluating LLMs' Reasoning on Temporally Evolving Semi-structured Tables	arxiv	2025-04-02	TQA over temporally evolving semi-structured tables	3,971 questions, 14,000 tables	Wikipedia	Infobox tables	Github
SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types	ACL 2025 Findings	2024-12-16	lookup, numerical reasoning, analysis and tabulation	953 samples			Github
MMQA: Evaluating LLMs with Multi-Table Multi-Hop Complex Questions	ICLR 2025	-	Multi-table retrieval, NL2SQL, Multi-table QA, and Key Selection (primary key and foreign key)	3,312 tables	Wikipedia	Flat tables
SpreadsheetBench: Towards Challenging Real World Spreadsheet Manipulation	NIPS 2024	2024-06-21	Spreadsheet Manipulation	2729 spreadsheets, 912 instructions	Excel Forum & Blog	Flat tables, hierarchical tables, multi-tables	Github
MiMoTable: A Multi-scale Spreadsheet Benchmark with Meta Operations for Table Reasoning	COLING 2024	2024-12-16	TQA,T2T,Table manipulation, Data analysis	1,719 (spreadsheet, question, answer) triplets from 428 different spreadsheets	Multiple domains	Flat and hierarchical tables	Github
DocTabQA: Answering Questions from Long Documents Using Tables	arxiv	2024-08-21	Table Generation based on question and document	300 documents and 1.5k question-table pairs	Financial	Flat tables and hierarchical tables	Github

8.2 Datasets

Title	Source	Date	Task	Data Volume	Domain	Table Type	Data and Code
ENTRANT: A Large Financial Dataset for Table Understanding	Sci Data	2024-07-04	Cell Type Classification, Header Extraction, et al	Millions of tables with cell attributes, as well as positional and hierarchical information	Financial	Flat tables and hierarchical tables	Github
TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering	arxiv	2024-08-17	TMR, TFV, Trend Forecasting and Chart Generation	3681 tables and 20K samples	Collect tables from academic datasets like WTQ and FeTaQA	Flat tables and a small number of hierarchical tables	Github

8.3 Classic Datasets of Downstream Table Tasks

9. Designing Evaluation Metrics for Table Understanding

Title	Source	Date	Task	Code
Revisiting Automated Evaluation for Long-form Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models	EMNLP 2024		TQA
Is This a Bad Table? A Closer Look at the Evaluation of Table Generation from Text	EMNLP 2024	2024-06-21	Text2Table