TabReason: A Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Reasoning LLM for Explainable Tabular Data Prediction

Tommy Miao Xu, Zhitian Zhang, Xiangyu Sun, Lauren Kelly Zung, Hossein Hajimirsadeghi, Greg Mori

Keywords: Tabular Data, Reasoning LLM, Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: Using RL to fine-tune LLMs for explainable tabular data prediction.

Abstract: Predictive modeling on tabular data is the cornerstone of many real-world applications. Although gradient boosting machines and some recent deep models achieve strong performance on tabular data, they often lack interpretability. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities to generate human-like reasoning and explanations, but remain under-performed for tabular data prediction. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages reasoning-based LLMs, trained using reinforcement learning, to perform more accurate and explainable predictions on tabular data. Our method introduces custom reward functions that guide the model not only toward high prediction accuracy but also toward human-understandable reasons for its predictions. Experimental results show that our model achieves promising performance on financial benchmark datasets, outperforming most existing LLMs.

Submission Number: 8