Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs

Naihao Deng, Zhenjie Sun, Ruiqi He, Aman Sikka, Yulong Chen, Lin Ma, Yue Zhang, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: Tables contrast with unstructured text data by its structure to organize the information.In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. We pioneer in the assessment of LLMs’ performance on image-based table representation. Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, revealing the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. We hope our study provides researchers insights into optimizing LLMs’ application in table-related tasks.