Towards Robust Real-World Spreadsheet Understanding with Multi-Agent Multi-Format Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ren, Houxing, Zhan, Mingjie, Lu, Zimu, Wang, Ke, Yang, Yunqiao, Hou, Haotian, Li, Hongsheng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911591856865280
author Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Li, Hongsheng
author_facet Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Li, Hongsheng
contents Spreadsheets are central to real-world applications such as enterprise reporting, auditing, and scientific data management. Despite their ubiquity, existing large language model based approaches typically treat tables as plain text, overlooking critical layout cues and visual semantics. Moreover, real-world spreadsheets are often massive in scale, exceeding the input length that LLMs can efficiently process. To address these challenges, we propose SpreadsheetAgent, a two-stage multi-agent framework for spreadsheet understanding that adopts a step-by-step reading and reasoning paradigm. Instead of loading the entire spreadsheet at once, SpreadsheetAgent incrementally interprets localized regions through multiple modalities, including code execution results, images, and LaTeX tables. The method first constructs a structural sketch and row/column summaries, and then performs task-driven reasoning over this intermediate representation in the Solving Stage. To further enhance reliability, we design a verification module that validates extracted structures via targeted inspections, reducing error propagation and ensuring trustworthy inputs for downstream reasoning. Extensive experiments on two spreadsheet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With GPT-OSS-120B, SpreadsheetAgent achieves 38.16% on Spreadsheet Bench, outperforming the ChatGPT Agent baseline (35.27%) by 2.89 absolute points. These results highlight the potential of SpreadsheetAgent to advance robust and scalable spreadsheet understanding in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/SpreadsheetAgent.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Robust Real-World Spreadsheet Understanding with Multi-Agent Multi-Format Reasoning
Ren, Houxing
Zhan, Mingjie
Lu, Zimu
Wang, Ke
Yang, Yunqiao
Hou, Haotian
Li, Hongsheng
Computation and Language
Spreadsheets are central to real-world applications such as enterprise reporting, auditing, and scientific data management. Despite their ubiquity, existing large language model based approaches typically treat tables as plain text, overlooking critical layout cues and visual semantics. Moreover, real-world spreadsheets are often massive in scale, exceeding the input length that LLMs can efficiently process. To address these challenges, we propose SpreadsheetAgent, a two-stage multi-agent framework for spreadsheet understanding that adopts a step-by-step reading and reasoning paradigm. Instead of loading the entire spreadsheet at once, SpreadsheetAgent incrementally interprets localized regions through multiple modalities, including code execution results, images, and LaTeX tables. The method first constructs a structural sketch and row/column summaries, and then performs task-driven reasoning over this intermediate representation in the Solving Stage. To further enhance reliability, we design a verification module that validates extracted structures via targeted inspections, reducing error propagation and ensuring trustworthy inputs for downstream reasoning. Extensive experiments on two spreadsheet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With GPT-OSS-120B, SpreadsheetAgent achieves 38.16% on Spreadsheet Bench, outperforming the ChatGPT Agent baseline (35.27%) by 2.89 absolute points. These results highlight the potential of SpreadsheetAgent to advance robust and scalable spreadsheet understanding in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/SpreadsheetAgent.git.
title Towards Robust Real-World Spreadsheet Understanding with Multi-Agent Multi-Format Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12282