Papers › TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models

TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models

7 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.04739archive 2025-07-28

Si-An Chen, Lesly Miculicich, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Zifeng Wang, Zilong Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yasuhisa Fujii, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister

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.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2410.04739")

Code

Syntology Ran 2 of 2 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong.

By repository: community: 2 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

2 samples harvested; 2 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
1ran · our draft was wrong

Licence: 2 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from yxh-y/TableRAG. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

get_sample_values yxh-y/TableRAG/offline_data_ingestion_and_query_interface/src/data_persistent.py community ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 5a9accc5c58815ba · report
infer_and_convert yxh-y/TableRAG/offline_data_ingestion_and_query_interface/src/data_persistent.py community ran · honoured contract no licence file found · pointer only · 62c3870ce4206da1 · report

Tasks

RAGRetrievalRetrieval-augmented Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections