Tables Decoded: DELTA for Structure, TARQA for Understanding
Table understanding is a core task in document intelligence, encompassing two key subtasks: table reconstruction and table visual question answering (TabVQA). While recent approaches predominantly rely on vision- language models (VLMs) operating on table images, we propose a more scalable and effective alternative based on structured textual representations. These representations are easier to process, align more naturally with LLMs, and eliminate the need for language-specific visual encoders, making them particularly suitable for multilingual documents. We present DELTA, which separates physical structure recognition, logical structure recognition, and OCR to extract both layout and content accurately. DELTA outputs tables in Optimised Table Structure Language (OTSL), a compact and unified format that encodes cell arrangements and textual content. On table structure recognition (TSR), DELTA achieves TEDS- Structure scores comparable with state-of-the-art methods across FinTabNet, PubTabNet, and PubTables-1M. We further establish its robustness on non-English tables through our curated Hindi benchmark, TORQUE. Building on this, we introduce TARQA, an LLM fine-tuned on OTSL sequences. Our approach yields gains of 9.3 p.p. on WTQ (TabQA) and 9.2 p.p. on FinTabNetQA (TabVQA), respectively. On TORQUE, our method ranks second among all VLMs and DELTA + LLM variants. We release our code, models, and benchmark at: https://github.com/Tihiitborg/Tables-Decoded
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Visual Question AnsweringSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
STARQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Complex Analytical Reasoning over Structured Databases
Semantic parsing methods for converting text to SQL queries enable question answering over structured data and can greatly benefit analysts who routinely perform complex analytics on vast data stored in specialized relat…
Time Series AnalysisQuestion AnsweringSemantic ParsingModelTables: A Corpus of Tables about Models
We present ModelTables, a benchmark of tables in Model Lakes that captures the structured semantics of performance and configuration tables often overlooked by text only retrieval. The corpus is built from Hugging Face m…
Information RetrievalSemantic RetrievalTable RetrievalTabular Embeddings for Tables with Bi-Dimensional Hierarchical Metadata and Nesting
Embeddings serve as condensed vector representations for real-world entities, finding applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Data Management across diverse downstream tasks. Here, we intr…
ManagementRAGTDeLTA: A Light-weight and Robust Table Detection Method based on Learning Text Arrangement
The diversity of tables makes table detection a great challenge, leading to existing models becoming more tedious and complex. Despite achieving high performance, they often overfit to the table style in training set, an…
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)Table Detectiontext-classificationText ClassificationHierarchical structure understanding in complex tables with VLLMs: a benchmark and experiments
This work investigates the ability of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) to understand and interpret the structure of tables in scientific articles. Specifically, we explore whether VLLMs can infer the hierarchical str…
Prompt Engineering