ExpliCIT-QA: Explainable Code-Based Image Table Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lagos, Maximiliano Hormazábal, Sáez, Álvaro Bueno, Doval, Pedro Alonso, Vesteiro, Jorge Alcalde, Cerezo-Costas, Héctor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lagos, Maximiliano Hormazábal
Sáez, Álvaro Bueno
Doval, Pedro Alonso
Vesteiro, Jorge Alcalde
Cerezo-Costas, Héctor
author_facet Lagos, Maximiliano Hormazábal
Sáez, Álvaro Bueno
Doval, Pedro Alonso
Vesteiro, Jorge Alcalde
Cerezo-Costas, Héctor
contents We present ExpliCIT-QA, a system that extends our previous MRT approach for tabular question answering into a multimodal pipeline capable of handling complex table images and providing explainable answers. ExpliCIT-QA follows a modular design, consisting of: (1) Multimodal Table Understanding, which uses a Chain-of-Thought approach to extract and transform content from table images; (2) Language-based Reasoning, where a step-by-step explanation in natural language is generated to solve the problem; (3) Automatic Code Generation, where Python/Pandas scripts are created based on the reasoning steps, with feedback for handling errors; (4) Code Execution to compute the final answer; and (5) Natural Language Explanation that describes how the answer was computed. The system is built for transparency and auditability: all intermediate outputs, parsed tables, reasoning steps, generated code, and final answers are available for inspection. This strategy works towards closing the explainability gap in end-to-end TableVQA systems. We evaluated ExpliCIT-QA on the TableVQA-Bench benchmark, comparing it with existing baselines. We demonstrated improvements in interpretability and transparency, which open the door for applications in sensitive domains like finance and healthcare where auditing results are critical.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ExpliCIT-QA: Explainable Code-Based Image Table Question Answering
Lagos, Maximiliano Hormazábal
Sáez, Álvaro Bueno
Doval, Pedro Alonso
Vesteiro, Jorge Alcalde
Cerezo-Costas, Héctor
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We present ExpliCIT-QA, a system that extends our previous MRT approach for tabular question answering into a multimodal pipeline capable of handling complex table images and providing explainable answers. ExpliCIT-QA follows a modular design, consisting of: (1) Multimodal Table Understanding, which uses a Chain-of-Thought approach to extract and transform content from table images; (2) Language-based Reasoning, where a step-by-step explanation in natural language is generated to solve the problem; (3) Automatic Code Generation, where Python/Pandas scripts are created based on the reasoning steps, with feedback for handling errors; (4) Code Execution to compute the final answer; and (5) Natural Language Explanation that describes how the answer was computed. The system is built for transparency and auditability: all intermediate outputs, parsed tables, reasoning steps, generated code, and final answers are available for inspection. This strategy works towards closing the explainability gap in end-to-end TableVQA systems. We evaluated ExpliCIT-QA on the TableVQA-Bench benchmark, comparing it with existing baselines. We demonstrated improvements in interpretability and transparency, which open the door for applications in sensitive domains like finance and healthcare where auditing results are critical.
title ExpliCIT-QA: Explainable Code-Based Image Table Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11694