18 accepted papers
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs), but they suffer from **inherently** much higher training variance. High variance leads to noisier gradient estimates and unstable optimization, so even equally strong pretrained MDMs and ARMs that are competi…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in automating data science workflows. However, existing models still struggle with multi-step reasoning and tool use, limiting their effectiveness on complex data analysis tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a scalable pipeline that ext
Understanding and reasoning over complex spreadsheets remain fundamental challenges for large language models (LLMs), which often struggle with intricate structures and rely solely on neural computation. In this work, we propose SheetBrain, a neuro-symbolic dual-workflow agent framework for precise
Modern Transformers predominantly adopt the Pre-Norm paradigm for its optimization stability, foregoing the superior potential of the unstable Post-Norm architecture. Prior attempts to combine their strengths typically lead to a stability-performance trade-off. We attribute this phenomenon to a stru…
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…
Language models such as GPT and Llama have shown remarkable ability on diverse natural language tasks, yet their performance on complex table tasks (e.g., NL-to-Code, data cleaning, etc.) continues to be suboptimal. To improve their performance, task-specific fine-tuning is often needed, which, howe
Tabular data are crucial in many fields and their understanding by large language models (LLMs) under high parameter efficiency paradigm is important. However, directly applying parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to tabular tasks presents significant challenges, particularly in terms…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in problem-solving by incorporating reasoning processes. However, this enhanced reasoning capability results in an increased number of output tokens during inference, leading to higher computational costs. To address this challenge, we propo
Large Language Models have revolutionized code generation ability by converting natural language descriptions into executable code. However, generating complex code within real-world scenarios remains challenging due to intricate structures, subtle bugs, understanding of advanced data types, and lac…
Spreadsheets are characterized by their extensive two-dimensional grids, flexible layouts, and varied formatting options, which pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). In response, we introduce SheetEncoder, pioneering an efficient encoding method designed to unleash and optimi…
Recent advances in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their usage in domain-specific tasks. Despite the success, fine-tuning continues to rely on repeated and lengthy prompts, which escalate computational expenses, require more resources, and lead to slower inference. In…
Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and str…
Tabular data analysis is crucial in various fields, and large language models show promise in this area. However, current research mostly focuses on rudimentary tasks like Text2SQL and TableQA, neglecting advanced analysis like forecasting and chart generation. To address this gap, we developed the…
Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains. It requires an accurate understanding of field semantics to correctly operate on table fields and find common patterns in daily analysis. In this paper, we introduce the AnaMeta dataset, a collection of 467k tables with derived supe…
There are sequence generation tasks where the best order to generate the target sequence is not left-to-right. For example, an answer to the Sudoku game, a structured code like s-expression, and even a logical natural language answer where the analysis may be generated after the decision. We define…
Online forms are widely used to collect data from human and have a multi-billion market. Many software products provide online services for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by predefined structures. However, the design and creation process of forms is sti…
Following the success of pre-training techniques in the natural language domain, a flurry of table pre-training frameworks have been proposed and have achieved new state-of-the-arts on various downstream tasks such as table question answering, table type recognition, column relation classification,…
Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to con…