Daily Papers

We present ExCyTIn-Bench, the first benchmark to Evaluate an LLM agent x on the task of Cyber Threat Investigation through security questions derived from investigation graphs. Real-world security analysts must sift through a large number of heterogeneous alert signals and security logs, follow multi-hop chains of evidence, and compile an incident report. With the developments of LLMs, building LLM-based agents for automatic thread investigation is a promising direction. To assist the development and evaluation of LLM agents, we construct a dataset from a controlled Azure tenant that covers 8 simulated real-world multi-step attacks, 57 log tables from Microsoft Sentinel and related services, and 589 automatically generated questions. We leverage security logs extracted with expert-crafted detection logic to build threat investigation graphs, and then generate questions with LLMs using paired nodes on the graph, taking the start node as background context and the end node as answer. Anchoring each question to these explicit nodes and edges not only provides automatic, explainable ground truth answers but also makes the pipeline reusable and readily extensible to new logs. This also enables the automatic generation of procedural tasks with verifiable rewards, which can be naturally extended to training agents via reinforcement learning. Our comprehensive experiments with different models confirm the difficulty of the task: with the base setting, the average reward across all evaluated models is 0.249, and the best achieved is 0.368, leaving substantial headroom for future research. Code and data are coming soon!

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.

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.

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.

Logs are imperative in the development and maintenance process of many software systems. They record detailed runtime information that allows developers and support engineers to monitor their systems and dissect anomalous behaviors and errors. The increasing scale and complexity of modern software systems, however, make the volume of logs explodes. In many cases, the traditional way of manual log inspection becomes impractical. Many recent studies, as well as industrial tools, resort to powerful text search and machine learning-based analytics solutions. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, a first crucial step is to parse log messages into structured data for subsequent analysis. In recent years, automated log parsing has been widely studied in both academia and industry, producing a series of log parsers by different techniques. To better understand the characteristics of these log parsers, in this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation study on automated log parsing and further release the tools and benchmarks for easy reuse. More specifically, we evaluate 13 log parsers on a total of 16 log datasets spanning distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. We report the benchmarking results in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, which are of practical importance when deploying automated log parsing in production. We also share the success stories and lessons learned in an industrial application at Huawei. We believe that our work could serve as the basis and provide valuable guidance to future research and deployment of automated log parsing.

Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.

Logging is a critical function in modern distributed applications, but the lack of standardization in log query languages and formats creates significant challenges. Developers currently must write ad hoc queries in platform-specific languages, requiring expertise in both the query language and application-specific log details -- an impractical expectation given the variety of platforms and volume of logs and applications. While generating these queries with large language models (LLMs) seems intuitive, we show that current LLMs struggle with log-specific query generation due to the lack of exposure to domain-specific knowledge. We propose a novel natural language (NL) interface to address these inconsistencies and aide log query generation, enabling developers to create queries in a target log query language by providing NL inputs. We further introduce ~NL2QL, a manually annotated, real-world dataset of natural language questions paired with corresponding LogQL queries spread across three log formats, to promote the training and evaluation of NL-to-loq query systems. Using NL2QL, we subsequently fine-tune and evaluate several state of the art LLMs, and demonstrate their improved capability to generate accurate LogQL queries. We perform further ablation studies to demonstrate the effect of additional training data, and the transferability across different log formats. In our experiments, we find up to 75\% improvement of finetuned models to generate LogQL queries compared to non finetuned models.

Logs have been widely adopted in software system development and maintenance because of the rich runtime information they record. In recent years, the increase of software size and complexity leads to the rapid growth of the volume of logs. To handle these large volumes of logs efficiently and effectively, a line of research focuses on developing intelligent and automated log analysis techniques. However, only a few of these techniques have reached successful deployments in industry due to the lack of public log datasets and open benchmarking upon them. To fill this significant gap and facilitate more research on AI-driven log analytics, we have collected and released loghub, a large collection of system log datasets. In particular, loghub provides 19 real-world log datasets collected from a wide range of software systems, including distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. In this paper, we summarize the statistics of these datasets, introduce some practical usage scenarios of the loghub datasets, and present our benchmarking results on loghub to benefit the researchers and practitioners in this field. Up to the time of this paper writing, the loghub datasets have been downloaded for roughly 90,000 times in total by hundreds of organizations from both industry and academia. The loghub datasets are available at https://github.com/logpai/loghub.

System logs record detailed runtime information of software systems and are used as the main data source for many tasks around software engineering. As modern software systems are evolving into large scale and complex structures, logs have become one type of fast-growing big data in industry. In particular, such logs often need to be stored for a long time in practice (e.g., a year), in order to analyze recurrent problems or track security issues. However, archiving logs consumes a large amount of storage space and computing resources, which in turn incurs high operational cost. Data compression is essential to reduce the cost of log storage. Traditional compression tools (e.g., gzip) work well for general texts, but are not tailed for system logs. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective log compression method, namely logzip. Logzip is capable of extracting hidden structures from raw logs via fast iterative clustering and further generating coherent intermediate representations that allow for more effective compression. We evaluate logzip on five large log datasets of different system types, with a total of 63.6 GB in size. The results show that logzip can save about half of the storage space on average over traditional compression tools. Meanwhile, the design of logzip is highly parallel and only incurs negligible overhead. In addition, we share our industrial experience of applying logzip to Huawei's real products.

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.

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.

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%.

Due to the sheer size of software logs, developers rely on automated techniques for log analysis. One of the first and most important steps of automated log analysis is log abstraction, which parses the raw logs into a structured format. Prior log abstraction techniques aim to identify and abstract all the dynamic variables in logs and output a static log template for automated log analysis. However, these abstracted dynamic variables may also contain important information that is useful to different tasks in log analysis. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of dynamic variables and their importance in practice, and explore the potential of a variable-aware log abstraction technique. Through manual investigations and surveys with practitioners, we find that different categories of dynamic variables record various information that can be important depending on the given tasks, the distinction of dynamic variables in log abstraction can further assist in log analysis. We then propose a deep learning based log abstraction approach, named VALB, which can identify different categories of dynamic variables and preserve the value of specified categories of dynamic variables along with the log templates (i.e., variable-aware log abstraction). Through the evaluation on a widely used log abstraction benchmark, we find that VALB outperforms other state-of-the-art log abstraction techniques on general log abstraction (i.e., when abstracting all the dynamic variables) and also achieves a high variable-aware log abstraction accuracy that further identifies the category of the dynamic variables. Our study highlights the potential of leveraging the important information recorded in the dynamic variables to further improve the process of log analysis.

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.

Logs, being run-time information automatically generated by software, record system events and activities with their timestamps. Before obtaining more insights into the run-time status of the software, a fundamental step of log analysis, called log parsing, is employed to extract structured templates and parameters from the semi-structured raw log messages. However, current log parsers are all syntax-based and regard each message as a character string, ignoring the semantic information included in parameters and templates. Thus, we propose the semantic-based parser SemParser to unlock the critical bottleneck of mining semantics from log messages. It contains two steps, an end-to-end semantic miner and a joint parser. Specifically, the first step aims to identify explicit semantics inside a single log, and the second step is responsible for jointly inferring implicit semantics and computing structural outputs based on the contextual knowledge base. To analyze the effectiveness of our semantic parser, we first demonstrate that it can derive rich semantics from log messages collected from six widely-applied systems with an average F1 score of 0.985. Then, we conduct two representative downstream tasks, showing that current downstream models improve their performance with appropriately extracted semantics by 1.2%-11.7% and 8.65% on two anomaly detection datasets and a failure identification dataset, respectively. We believe these findings provide insights into semantically understanding log messages for the log analysis community.

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.

EHR audit logs are a highly granular stream of events that capture clinician activities, and is a significant area of interest for research in characterizing clinician workflow on the electronic health record (EHR). Existing techniques to measure the complexity of workflow through EHR audit logs (audit logs) involve time- or frequency-based cross-sectional aggregations that are unable to capture the full complexity of a EHR session. We briefly evaluate the usage of transformer-based tabular language model (tabular LM) in measuring the entropy or disorderedness of action sequences within workflow and release the evaluated models publicly.

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.

Logs generated by large-scale software systems provide crucial information for engineers to understand the system status and diagnose problems of the systems. Log parsing, which converts raw log messages into structured data, is the first step to enabling automated log analytics. Existing log parsers extract the common part as log templates using statistical features. However, these log parsers often fail to identify the correct templates and parameters because: 1) they often overlook the semantic meaning of log messages, and 2) they require domain-specific knowledge for different log datasets. To address the limitations of existing methods, in this paper, we propose LogPPT to capture the patterns of templates using prompt-based few-shot learning. LogPPT utilises a novel prompt tuning method to recognise keywords and parameters based on a few labelled log data. In addition, an adaptive random sampling algorithm is designed to select a small yet diverse training set. We have conducted extensive experiments on 16 public log datasets. The experimental results show that LogPPT is effective and efficient for log parsing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Log analysis is crucial for ensuring the orderly and stable operation of information systems, particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in natural language processing tasks. In the AIOps domain, they excel in tasks such as anomaly detection, root cause analysis of faults, operations and maintenance script generation, and alert information summarization. However, the performance of current LLMs in log analysis tasks remains inadequately validated. To address this gap, we introduce LogEval, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in various log analysis tasks for the first time. This benchmark covers tasks such as log parsing, log anomaly detection, log fault diagnosis, and log summarization. LogEval evaluates each task using 4,000 publicly available log data entries and employs 15 different prompts for each task to ensure a thorough and fair assessment. By rigorously evaluating leading LLMs, we demonstrate the impact of various LLM technologies on log analysis performance, focusing on aspects such as self-consistency and few-shot contextual learning. We also discuss findings related to model quantification, Chinese-English question-answering evaluation, and prompt engineering. These findings provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in multilingual environments and the effectiveness of different prompt strategies. Various evaluation methods are employed for different tasks to accurately measure the performance of LLMs in log analysis, ensuring a comprehensive assessment. The insights gained from LogEvals evaluation reveal the strengths and limitations of LLMs in log analysis tasks, providing valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners.

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.

Software and System logs record runtime information about processes executing within a system. These logs have become the most critical and ubiquitous forms of observability data that help developers understand system behavior, monitor system health and resolve issues. However, the volume of logs generated can be humongous (of the order of petabytes per day) especially for complex distributed systems, such as cloud, search engine, social media, etc. This has propelled a lot of research on developing AI-based log based analytics and intelligence solutions that can process huge volume of raw logs and generate insights. In order to enable users to perform multiple types of AI-based log analysis tasks in a uniform manner, we introduce LogAI (https://github.com/salesforce/logai), a one-stop open source library for log analytics and intelligence. LogAI supports tasks such as log summarization, log clustering and log anomaly detection. It adopts the OpenTelemetry data model, to enable compatibility with different log management platforms. LogAI provides a unified model interface and provides popular time-series, statistical learning and deep learning models. Alongside this, LogAI also provides an out-of-the-box GUI for users to conduct interactive analysis. With LogAI, we can also easily benchmark popular deep learning algorithms for log anomaly detection without putting in redundant effort to process the logs. We have opensourced LogAI to cater to a wide range of applications benefiting both academic research and industrial prototyping.

Event log analysis is an important task that security professionals undertake. Event logs record key information on activities that occur on computing devices, and due to the substantial number of events generated, they consume a large amount of time and resources to analyse. This demanding and repetitive task is also prone to errors. To address these concerns, researchers have developed automated techniques to improve the event log analysis process. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the ability to successfully perform a wide range of tasks that individuals would usually partake in, to high standards, and at a pace and degree of complexity that outperform humans. Due to this, researchers are rapidly investigating the use of LLMs for event log analysis. This includes fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and in-context learning, which affect performance. These works demonstrate good progress, yet there is a need to understand the developing body of knowledge, identify commonalities between works, and identify key challenges and potential solutions to further developments in this domain. This paper aims to survey LLM-based event log analysis techniques, providing readers with an in-depth overview of the domain, gaps identified in previous research, and concluding with potential avenues to explore in future.

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.

IT environments typically have logging mechanisms to monitor system health and detect issues. However, the huge volume of generated logs makes manual inspection impractical, highlighting the importance of automated log analysis in IT Software Support. In this paper, we propose a log analytics tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for log data processing and issue diagnosis, enabling the generation of automated insights and summaries. We further present a novel approach for efficiently running LLMs on CPUs to process massive log volumes in minimal time without compromising output quality. We share the insights and lessons learned from deployment of the tool - in production since March 2024 - scaled across 70 software products, processing over 2000 tickets for issue diagnosis, achieving a time savings of 300+ man hours and an estimated $15,444 per month in manpower costs compared to the traditional log analysis practices.

Extensive research has been conducted to explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in table reasoning. However, the essential task of transforming tables information into reports remains a significant challenge for industrial applications. This task is plagued by two critical issues: 1) the complexity and diversity of tables lead to suboptimal reasoning outcomes; and 2) existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of this task. To fill this gap, we propose the table-to-report task and construct a bilingual benchmark named T2R-bench, where the key information flow from the tables to the reports for this task. The benchmark comprises 457 industrial tables, all derived from real-world scenarios and encompassing 19 industry domains as well as 4 types of industrial tables. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation criteria to fairly measure the quality of report generation. The experiments on 25 widely-used LLMs reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Deepseek-R1 only achieves performance with 62.71 overall score, indicating that LLMs still have room for improvement on T2R-bench. Source code and data will be available after acceptance.

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.

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.

Learning embedding table plays a fundamental role in Click-through rate(CTR) prediction from the view of the model performance and memory usage. The embedding table is a two-dimensional tensor, with its axes indicating the number of feature values and the embedding dimension, respectively. To learn an efficient and effective embedding table, recent works either assign various embedding dimensions for feature fields and reduce the number of embeddings respectively or mask the embedding table parameters. However, all these existing works cannot get an optimal embedding table. On the one hand, various embedding dimensions still require a large amount of memory due to the vast number of features in the dataset. On the other hand, decreasing the number of embeddings usually suffers from performance degradation, which is intolerable in CTR prediction. Finally, pruning embedding parameters will lead to a sparse embedding table, which is hard to be deployed. To this end, we propose an optimal embedding table learning framework OptEmbed, which provides a practical and general method to find an optimal embedding table for various base CTR models. Specifically, we propose pruning the redundant embeddings regarding corresponding features' importance by learnable pruning thresholds. Furthermore, we consider assigning various embedding dimensions as one single candidate architecture. To efficiently search the optimal embedding dimensions, we design a uniform embedding dimension sampling scheme to equally train all candidate architectures, meaning architecture-related parameters and learnable thresholds are trained simultaneously in one supernet. We then propose an evolution search method based on the supernet to find the optimal embedding dimensions for each field. Experiments on public datasets show that OptEmbed can learn a compact embedding table which can further improve the model performance.

Beyond pure text, a substantial amount of knowledge is stored in tables. In real-world scenarios, user questions often require retrieving answers that are distributed across multiple tables. GraphRAG has recently attracted much attention for enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities by organizing external knowledge to address ad-hoc and complex questions, exemplifying a promising direction for cross-table question answering. In this paper, to address the current gap in available data, we first introduce a multi-table benchmark, MutliTableQA, comprising 60k tables and 25k user queries collected from real-world sources. Then, we propose the first Graph-Table-RAG framework, namely GTR, which reorganizes table corpora into a heterogeneous graph, employs a hierarchical coarse-to-fine retrieval process to extract the most relevant tables, and integrates graph-aware prompting for downstream LLMs' tabular reasoning. Extensive experiments show that GTR exhibits superior cross-table question-answering performance while maintaining high deployment efficiency, demonstrating its real-world practical applicability.

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

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.

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-to-text generation refers to generating a descriptive text from a key-value table. Traditional autoregressive methods, though can generate text with high fluency, suffer from low coverage and poor faithfulness problems. To mitigate these problems, we propose a novel Skeleton-based two-stage method that combines both Autoregressive and Non-Autoregressive generations (SANA). Our approach includes: (1) skeleton generation with an autoregressive pointer network to select key tokens from the source table; (2) edit-based non-autoregressive generation model to produce texts via iterative insertion and deletion operations. By integrating hard constraints from the skeleton, the non-autoregressive model improves the generation's coverage over the source table and thus enhances its faithfulness. We conduct automatic and human evaluations on both WikiPerson and WikiBio datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in both automatic and human evaluation, especially on coverage and faithfulness. In particular, we achieve PARENT-T recall of 99.47 in WikiPerson, improving over the existing best results by more than 10 points.

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.

The increasing complexity of computer systems necessitates innovative approaches to fault and error management, going beyond traditional manual log analysis. While existing solutions using large language models (LLMs) show promise, they are limited by a gap between natural and domain-specific languages, which restricts their effectiveness in real-world applications. Our approach addresses these limitations by integrating interpretable domain knowledge into open-source LLMs through continual pre-training (CPT), enhancing performance on log tasks while retaining natural language processing capabilities. We created a comprehensive dataset, NLPLog, with over 250,000 question-answer pairs to facilitate this integration. Our model, SuperLog, trained with this dataset, achieves the best performance across four log analysis tasks, surpassing the second-best model by an average of 12.01%. Our contributions include a novel CPT paradigm that significantly improves model performance, the development of SuperLog with state-of-the-art results, and the release of a large-scale dataset to support further research in this domain.

Tables are often created with hierarchies, but existing works on table reasoning mainly focus on flat tables and neglect hierarchical tables. Hierarchical tables challenge existing methods by hierarchical indexing, as well as implicit relationships of calculation and semantics. This work presents HiTab, a free and open dataset to study question answering (QA) and natural language generation (NLG) over hierarchical tables. HiTab is a cross-domain dataset constructed from a wealth of statistical reports (analyses) and Wikipedia pages, and has unique characteristics: (1) nearly all tables are hierarchical, and (2) both target sentences for NLG and questions for QA are revised from original, meaningful, and diverse descriptive sentences authored by analysts and professions of reports. (3) to reveal complex numerical reasoning in statistical analyses, we provide fine-grained annotations of entity and quantity alignment. HiTab provides 10,686 QA pairs and descriptive sentences with well-annotated quantity and entity alignment on 3,597 tables with broad coverage of table hierarchies and numerical reasoning types. Targeting hierarchical structure, we devise a novel hierarchy-aware logical form for symbolic reasoning over tables, which shows high effectiveness. Targeting complex numerical reasoning, we propose partially supervised training given annotations of entity and quantity alignment, which helps models to largely reduce spurious predictions in the QA task. In the NLG task, we find that entity and quantity alignment also helps NLG models to generate better results in a conditional generation setting. Experiment results of state-of-the-art baselines suggest that this dataset presents a strong challenge and a valuable benchmark for future research.

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.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

Software systems often record important runtime information in logs to help with troubleshooting. Log-based anomaly detection has become a key research area that aims to identify system issues through log data, ultimately enhancing the reliability of software systems. Traditional deep learning methods often struggle to capture the semantic information embedded in log data, which is typically organized in natural language. In this paper, we propose LogLLM, a log-based anomaly detection framework that leverages large language models (LLMs). LogLLM employs BERT for extracting semantic vectors from log messages, while utilizing Llama, a transformer decoder-based model, for classifying log sequences. Additionally, we introduce a projector to align the vector representation spaces of BERT and Llama, ensuring a cohesive understanding of log semantics. Unlike conventional methods that require log parsers to extract templates, LogLLM preprocesses log messages with regular expressions, streamlining the entire process. Our framework is trained through a novel three-stage procedure designed to enhance performance and adaptability. Experimental results across four public datasets demonstrate that LogLLM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Even when handling unstable logs, it effectively captures the semantic meaning of log messages and detects anomalies accurately.

In the domain of data science, the predictive tasks of classification, regression, and imputation of missing values are commonly encountered challenges associated with tabular data. This research endeavors to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) towards addressing these predictive tasks. Despite their proficiency in comprehending natural language, LLMs fall short in dealing with structured tabular data. This limitation stems from their lacking exposure to the intricacies of tabular data during their foundational training. Our research aims to mitigate this gap by compiling a comprehensive corpus of tables annotated with instructions and executing large-scale training of Llama-2 on this enriched dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the practical application of applying the trained model to zero-shot prediction, few-shot prediction, and in-context learning scenarios. Through extensive experiments, our methodology has shown significant improvements over existing benchmarks. These advancements highlight the efficacy of tailoring LLM training to solve table-related problems in data science, thereby establishing a new benchmark in the utilization of LLMs for enhancing tabular intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we introduce SciGen, a new challenge dataset for the task of reasoning-aware data-to-text generation consisting of tables from scientific articles and their corresponding descriptions. Describing scientific tables goes beyond the surface realization of the table content and requires reasoning over table values. The unique properties of SciGen are that (1) tables mostly contain numerical values, and (2) the corresponding descriptions require arithmetic reasoning. SciGen is therefore the first dataset that assesses the arithmetic reasoning capabilities of generation models on complex input structures, i.e., tables from scientific articles. We study the effectiveness of state-of-the-art data-to-text generation models on SciGen and evaluate the results using common metrics as well as human evaluation. Our results and analyses show that (a) while humans like to reason for describing scientific tables, the ability of state-of-the-art models is severely limited on this task, (b) while adding more training data improves the results, it is not the solution for reasoning-aware text generation, and (c) one of the main bottlenecks for this task is the lack of proper automatic evaluation metrics. The data, code, and annotations for human evaluation will be available at https://github.com/UKPLab/SciGen. SciGen opens new avenues for future research in reasoning-aware text generation and evaluation.

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.

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.

Automated log analysis is crucial to ensure high availability and reliability of complex systems. The advent of LLMs in NLP has ushered in a new era of language model-driven automated log analysis, garnering significant interest. Within this field, two primary paradigms based on language models for log analysis have become prominent. Small Language Models (SLMs) follow the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, focusing on the specific log analysis task through fine-tuning on supervised datasets. On the other hand, LLMs following the in-context learning paradigm, analyze logs by providing a few examples in prompt contexts without updating parameters. Despite their respective strengths, we notice that SLMs are more cost-effective but less powerful, whereas LLMs with large parameters are highly powerful but expensive and inefficient. To trade-off between the performance and inference costs of both models in automated log analysis, this paper introduces an adaptive log analysis framework known as AdaptiveLog, which effectively reduces the costs associated with LLM while ensuring superior results. This framework collaborates an LLM and a small language model, strategically allocating the LLM to tackle complex logs while delegating simpler logs to the SLM. Specifically, to efficiently query the LLM, we propose an adaptive selection strategy based on the uncertainty estimation of the SLM, where the LLM is invoked only when the SLM is uncertain. In addition, to enhance the reasoning ability of the LLM in log analysis tasks, we propose a novel prompt strategy by retrieving similar error-prone cases as the reference, enabling the model to leverage past error experiences and learn solutions from these cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptiveLog achieves state-of-the-art results across different tasks, elevating the overall accuracy of log analysis while maintaining cost efficiency.

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.

Due to the usefulness in data enrichment for data analysis tasks, joinable table discovery has become an important operation in data lake management. Existing approaches target equi-joins, the most common way of combining tables for creating a unified view, or semantic joins, which tolerate misspellings and different formats to deliver more join results. They are either exact solutions whose running time is linear in the sizes of query column and target table repository or approximate solutions lacking precision. In this paper, we propose Deepjoin, a deep learning model for accurate and efficient joinable table discovery. Our solution is an embedding-based retrieval, which employs a pre-trained language model (PLM) and is designed as one framework serving both equi- and semantic joins. We propose a set of contextualization options to transform column contents to a text sequence. The PLM reads the sequence and is fine-tuned to embed columns to vectors such that columns are expected to be joinable if they are close to each other in the vector space. Since the output of the PLM is fixed in length, the subsequent search procedure becomes independent of the column size. With a state-of-the-art approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm, the search time is logarithmic in the repository size. To train the model, we devise the techniques for preparing training data as well as data augmentation. The experiments on real datasets demonstrate that by training on a small subset of a corpus, Deepjoin generalizes to large datasets and its precision consistently outperforms other approximate solutions'. Deepjoin is even more accurate than an exact solution to semantic joins when evaluated with labels from experts. Moreover, when equipped with a GPU, Deepjoin is up to two orders of magnitude faster than existing solutions.

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.

Recent research in tabular data synthesis has focused on single tables, whereas real-world applications often involve complex data with tens or hundreds of interconnected tables. Previous approaches to synthesizing multi-relational (multi-table) data fall short in two key aspects: scalability for larger datasets and capturing long-range dependencies, such as correlations between attributes spread across different tables. Inspired by the success of diffusion models in tabular data modeling, we introduce Cluster Latent Variable guided Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (ClavaDDPM). This novel approach leverages clustering labels as intermediaries to model relationships between tables, specifically focusing on foreign key constraints. ClavaDDPM leverages the robust generation capabilities of diffusion models while incorporating efficient algorithms to propagate the learned latent variables across tables. This enables ClavaDDPM to capture long-range dependencies effectively. Extensive evaluations on multi-table datasets of varying sizes show that ClavaDDPM significantly outperforms existing methods for these long-range dependencies while remaining competitive on utility metrics for single-table data.

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

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.

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.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their remarkable parameter size and their impressive high requirement of computing resources pose challenges for their practical deployment. Recent research has revealed that specific capabilities of LLMs, such as numerical reasoning, can be transferred to smaller models through distillation. Some studies explore the potential of leveraging LLMs to perform table-based reasoning. Nevertheless, prior to our work, there has been no investigation into the prospect of specialising table reasoning skills in smaller models specifically tailored for table-to-text generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel table-based reasoning distillation, with the aim of distilling distilling LLMs into tailored, smaller models specifically designed for table-based reasoning task. Experimental results have shown that a 0.22 billion parameter model (Flan-T5-base) fine-tuned using distilled data, not only achieves a significant improvement compared to traditionally fine-tuned baselines but also surpasses specific LLMs like gpt-3.5-turbo on the scientific table-to-text generation dataset (SciGen). The code and data are released in https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/TableDistill.

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.

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.

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.

Without accurate transcription of numerical data in scientific documents, a scientist cannot draw accurate conclusions. Unfortunately, the process of copying numerical data from one paper to another is prone to human error. In this paper, we propose to meet this challenge through the novel task of automatic table verification (AutoTV), in which the objective is to verify the accuracy of numerical data in tables by cross-referencing cited sources. To support this task, we propose a new benchmark, arXiVeri, which comprises tabular data drawn from open-access academic papers on arXiv. We introduce metrics to evaluate the performance of a table verifier in two key areas: (i) table matching, which aims to identify the source table in a cited document that corresponds to a target table, and (ii) cell matching, which aims to locate shared cells between a target and source table and identify their row and column indices accurately. By leveraging the flexible capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), we propose simple baselines for table verification. Our findings highlight the complexity of this task, even for state-of-the-art LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4. The code and benchmark will be made publicly available.

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.

Data used for analytics and machine learning often take the form of tables with categorical entries. We introduce a family of lossless compression algorithms for such data that proceed in four steps: (i) Estimate latent variables associated to rows and columns; (ii) Partition the table in blocks according to the row/column latents; (iii) Apply a sequential (e.g. Lempel-Ziv) coder to each of the blocks; (iv) Append a compressed encoding of the latents. We evaluate it on several benchmark datasets, and study optimal compression in a probabilistic model for that tabular data, whereby latent values are independent and table entries are conditionally independent given the latent values. We prove that the model has a well defined entropy rate and satisfies an asymptotic equipartition property. We also prove that classical compression schemes such as Lempel-Ziv and finite-state encoders do not achieve this rate. On the other hand, the latent estimation strategy outlined above achieves the optimal rate.

We introduce SpreadsheetBench, a challenging spreadsheet manipulation benchmark exclusively derived from real-world scenarios, designed to immerse current large language models (LLMs) in the actual workflow of spreadsheet users. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on synthesized queries and simplified spreadsheet files, SpreadsheetBench is built from 912 real questions gathered from online Excel forums, which reflect the intricate needs of users. The associated spreadsheets from the forums contain a variety of tabular data such as multiple tables, non-standard relational tables, and abundant non-textual elements. Furthermore, we propose a more reliable evaluation metric akin to online judge platforms, where multiple spreadsheet files are created as test cases for each instruction, ensuring the evaluation of robust solutions capable of handling spreadsheets with varying values. Our comprehensive evaluation of various LLMs under both single-round and multi-round inference settings reveals a substantial gap between the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and human performance, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty.

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.

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.

Real-world financial documents report essential information about an entity's financial holdings that can span millions of different financial instrument types. Yet, these details are often buried in messy, multi-page, fragmented tables - for example, 99.4% of the tables in our dataset have no bounding boxes with the maximum number of rows amounting to 426 per table across 44 pages. To tackle these unique challenges from real-world tables, we present a continuously learning, agentic table extraction system, TASER (Table Agents for Schema-guided Extraction and Recommendation) that extracts highly unstructured, multi-page, heterogeneous tables into normalized, schema-conforming outputs. Our table agents execute on table detection, classification, extraction, and recommendations by leveraging an initial schema. Then, our Recommender Agent reviews the outputs, recommends schema revisions, and decides on the final recommendations, enabling TASER to outperform existing table detection models such as Table Transformer by 10.1%. Within this continuous learning process, we highlight that larger batch sizes result in a 104.3% increase in schema recommendations that are actionable and utilized, resulting in a 9.8% increase in extracted holdings - highlighting the importance of a continuous learning process. To train TASER, we have manually labeled 22,584 pages (28,150,449 tokens), 3,213 tables for $731,685,511,687 of holdings culminating in one of the first real financial table datasets. We release our dataset TASERTab to enable the research community to access real-world financial tables and outputs. Our results highlight the promise of agentic, schema-guided extraction systems for robust understanding of real-world financial tables.

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

People primarily consult tables to conduct data analysis or answer specific questions. Text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries tailored to users' information needs can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. However, existing table-to-text generation studies primarily focus on converting tabular data into coherent statements, rather than addressing information-seeking purposes. In this paper, we define a new query-focused table summarization task, where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored summary, and we introduce a new benchmark named QTSumm for this task. QTSumm consists of 5,625 human-annotated query-summary pairs over 2,437 tables on diverse topics. Moreover, we investigate state-of-the-art models (i.e., text generation, table-to-text generation, and large language models) on the QTSumm dataset. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that our benchmark presents significant challenges in table-to-text generation for future research.

Existing text-to-SQL benchmarks have largely been constructed from web tables with human-generated question-SQL pairs. LLMs typically show strong results on these benchmarks, leading to a belief that LLMs are effective at text-to-SQL tasks. However, how these results transfer to enterprise settings is unclear because tables in enterprise databases might differ substantially from web tables in structure and content. To contend with this problem, we introduce a new dataset BEAVER, the first enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark sourced from real private enterprise data warehouses. This dataset includes natural language queries and their correct SQL statements, which we collected from actual query logs. We then benchmark off-the-shelf LLMs on this dataset. LLMs perform poorly, even when augmented with standard prompt engineering and RAG techniques. We identify three main reasons for the poor performance: (1) schemas of enterprise tables are more complex than the schemas in public data, resulting in SQL-generation tasks intrinsically harder; (2) business-oriented questions are often more complex, requiring joins over multiple tables, aggregations, and nested queries; (3) public LLMs cannot train on private enterprise data warehouses that are not publicly accessible, and therefore it is difficult for the model to learn to solve (1) and (2). We believe BEAVER will facilitate future research in building text-to-SQL systems that perform better in enterprise settings.

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have notably enhanced their ability to reason with tabular data, primarily through program-aided mechanisms that manipulate and analyze tables. However, these methods often require the entire table as input, leading to scalability challenges due to the positional bias or context length constraints. In response to these challenges, we introduce TableRAG, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework specifically designed for LM-based table understanding. TableRAG leverages query expansion combined with schema and cell retrieval to pinpoint crucial information before providing it to the LMs. This enables more efficient data encoding and precise retrieval, significantly reducing prompt lengths and mitigating information loss. We have developed two new million-token benchmarks from the Arcade and BIRD-SQL datasets to thoroughly evaluate TableRAG's effectiveness at scale. Our results demonstrate that TableRAG's retrieval design achieves the highest retrieval quality, leading to the new state-of-the-art performance on large-scale table understanding.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability on controllable text generation. However, the potential of LLMs in generating text from structured tables remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we study the capabilities of LLMs for table-to-text generation tasks, particularly aiming to investigate their performance in generating natural language statements that can be logically entailed by a provided table. First, we investigate how LLMs compare to state-of-the-art table-to-text fine-tuned models, and demonstrate that LLMs can generate statements with higher faithfulness compared with previous state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Given this finding, we next explore whether LLMs can serve as faithfulness-level automated evaluation metrics. Through human evaluation, we show that evaluation metrics adopted from LLMs correlates better with human judgments compared with existing faithfulness-level metrics. Finally, we demonstrate that LLMs using chain-of-thought prompting can generate high-fidelity natural language feedback for other table-to-text models' generations, provide insights for future work regarding the distillation of text generation capabilities from LLMs to smaller models.

Recent progress in language model pre-training has achieved a great success via leveraging large-scale unstructured textual data. However, it is still a challenge to apply pre-training on structured tabular data due to the absence of large-scale high-quality tabular data. In this paper, we propose TAPEX to show that table pre-training can be achieved by learning a neural SQL executor over a synthetic corpus, which is obtained by automatically synthesizing executable SQL queries and their execution outputs. TAPEX addresses the data scarcity challenge via guiding the language model to mimic a SQL executor on the diverse, large-scale and high-quality synthetic corpus. We evaluate TAPEX on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that TAPEX outperforms previous table pre-training approaches by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them. This includes the improvements on the weakly-supervised WikiSQL denotation accuracy to 89.5% (+2.3%), the WikiTableQuestions denotation accuracy to 57.5% (+4.8%), the SQA denotation accuracy to 74.5% (+3.5%), and the TabFact accuracy to 84.2% (+3.2%). To our knowledge, this is the first work to exploit table pre-training via synthetic executable programs and to achieve new state-of-the-art results on various downstream tasks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/Table-Pretraining.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.

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.

We consider a number of graph kernels and proximity measures including commute time kernel, regularized Laplacian kernel, heat kernel, exponential diffusion kernel (also called "communicability"), etc., and the corresponding distances as applied to clustering nodes in random graphs and several well-known datasets. The model of generating random graphs involves edge probabilities for the pairs of nodes that belong to the same class or different predefined classes of nodes. It turns out that in most cases, logarithmic measures (i.e., measures resulting after taking logarithm of the proximities) perform better while distinguishing underlying classes than the "plain" measures. A comparison in terms of reject curves of inter-class and intra-class distances confirms this conclusion. A similar conclusion can be made for several well-known datasets. A possible origin of this effect is that most kernels have a multiplicative nature, while the nature of distances used in cluster algorithms is an additive one (cf. the triangle inequality). The logarithmic transformation is a tool to transform the first nature to the second one. Moreover, some distances corresponding to the logarithmic measures possess a meaningful cutpoint additivity property. In our experiments, the leader is usually the logarithmic Communicability measure. However, we indicate some more complicated cases in which other measures, typically, Communicability and plain Walk, can be the winners.