TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning

Table-based reasoning has shown remarkable progress in combining deep models with discrete reasoning, which requires reasoning over both free-form natural language (NL) questions and semi-structured tabular data. However, previous table reasoning solutions only consider small-sized tables and exhibit limitations in handling larger tables. In addition, most existing methods struggle to reason over complex questions since they lack essential information or they are scattered in different places. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processing toolbox to generate table prompts through (1) table sampling, (2) table augmentation, and (3) table packing while balancing the token allocation trade-off. In each module, we collect and design several common methods for usage in various scenarios (e.g., speed over accuracy). We also provide a comprehensive evaluation on performance of each components inside TAP4LLM and show that our method improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.