TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning

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Autori principali: Yu, Xiaohan, Jian, Pu, Chen, Chong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yu, Xiaohan
Jian, Pu
Chen, Chong
author_facet Yu, Xiaohan
Jian, Pu
Chen, Chong
contents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated considerable effectiveness in open-domain question answering. However, when applied to heterogeneous documents, comprising both textual and tabular components, existing RAG approaches exhibit critical limitations. The prevailing practice of flattening tables and chunking strategies disrupts the intrinsic tabular structure, leads to information loss, and undermines the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop, global queries. To address these challenges, we propose TableRAG, an SQL-based framework that unifies textual understanding and complex manipulations over tabular data. TableRAG iteratively operates in four steps: context-sensitive query decomposition, text retrieval, SQL programming and execution, and compositional intermediate answer generation. We also develop HeteQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-hop heterogeneous reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that TableRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines on both public datasets and our HeteQA, establishing a new state-of-the-art for heterogeneous document question answering. We release TableRAG at https://github.com/yxh-y/TableRAG/tree/main.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10380
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning
Yu, Xiaohan
Jian, Pu
Chen, Chong
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated considerable effectiveness in open-domain question answering. However, when applied to heterogeneous documents, comprising both textual and tabular components, existing RAG approaches exhibit critical limitations. The prevailing practice of flattening tables and chunking strategies disrupts the intrinsic tabular structure, leads to information loss, and undermines the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop, global queries. To address these challenges, we propose TableRAG, an SQL-based framework that unifies textual understanding and complex manipulations over tabular data. TableRAG iteratively operates in four steps: context-sensitive query decomposition, text retrieval, SQL programming and execution, and compositional intermediate answer generation. We also develop HeteQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-hop heterogeneous reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that TableRAG consistently outperforms existing baselines on both public datasets and our HeteQA, establishing a new state-of-the-art for heterogeneous document question answering. We release TableRAG at https://github.com/yxh-y/TableRAG/tree/main.
title TableRAG: A Retrieval Augmented Generation Framework for Heterogeneous Document Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10380