Shenghao Ye, Yuxiang Wang, Yu Guo, Tao Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Zijian Wen, Qihui Zhu, Mengjie Zhang 等 11 位作者
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on table reasoning tasks but incur substantial inference cost due to long reasoning traces. Stepwise model routing mitigates this issue by dynamically assigning reasoning steps to smaller or larger models. However, stepwise model routing for table reasoning remains underexplored. Through empirical analysis, we find that reasoning steps involving tables contain two types of tokens with distinct uncertainty distributions: table tokens grounded in table structure, such as cell values and headers, and text tokens representing surrounding natural-language reasoning. The uncertainty of both token types is correlated with the risk that the model makes an error in the next reasoning step. However, existing methods fail to model them separately, leading to suboptimal routing decisions. To address this, we propose EcoTab, a table-aware stepwise routing framework for efficient table reasoning. At each reasoning step, EcoTab separately estimates the uncertainties of table tokens and text tokens, maps them to next-step failure risks for the small model, and combines the two risks for routing. Experiments on multiple table reasoning benchmarks show that EcoTab consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves a better balance between accuracy and efficiency.
Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Zhengheng Li, Qiang Huang, Shuangwu Chen, Wang Luo, Qian Rui, Jie Zhang 等 13 位作者
Stepwise model routing improves the efficiency of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) by assigning each reasoning step to a suitable model. Recent methods formulate routing as a sequential decision process and train the router with reinforcement learning. However, although they model routing as a process, they still supervise the router with outcome rewards. Such rewards only reflect final answer correctness and fail to evaluate intermediate routing decisions, which can weaken performance and generalization. To address this gap, we propose RoRo, a rubric-guided process reward framework for stepwise model routing. RoRo first collects diverse routing trajectories and constructs preference pairs based on outcome, cost, and process quality. It then trains a Rubricor to generate a query-specific evaluation rubric and a Judge to score routing trajectories under this rubric through alternating optimization. The resulting process rewards are combined with outcome rewards to optimize the routing policy via GRPO. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks under both same-family and cross-family settings show that RoRo consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves better accuracy and cost trade-offs.
Shenghao Ye University of Science and Technology of China, Yu Guo University of Science and Technology of China, Dong Jin, Yuxiang Wang, Yikai Shen University of Science and Technology of China, Yunpeng Hou, Shuangwu Chen, Jianyang University of Science and Technology of China 等 9 位作者
Table question answering (TableQA) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). The strong reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advances in this field. However, as real-world applications involve increasingly complex questions and larger tables, substantial noisy data is introduced, which severely degrades reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we focus on improving two core capabilities: Relevance Filtering, which identifies and retains information truly relevant to reasoning, and Table Pruning, which reduces table size while preserving essential content. Based on these principles, we propose EnoTab, a dual denoising framework for complex questions and large-scale tables. Specifically, we first perform Evidence-based Question Denoising by decomposing the question into minimal semantic units and filtering out those irrelevant to answer reasoning based on consistency and usability criteria. Then, we propose Evidence Tree-guided Table Denoising, which constructs an explicit and transparent table pruning path to remove irrelevant data step by step. At each pruning step, we observe the intermediate state of the table and apply a post-order node rollback mechanism to handle abnormal table states, ultimately producing a highly reliable sub-table for final answer reasoning. Finally, extensive experiments show that EnoTab achieves outstanding performance on TableQA tasks with complex questions and large-scale tables, confirming its effectiveness.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yu Guo University of Science and Technology of China, Shenghao Ye University of Science and Technology of China, Shuangwu Chen, Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang University of Science and Technology of China, Bai Qirui, Dong Jin, Yunpeng Hou 等 11 位作者
Table Question Answering (TableQA) benefits significantly from table pruning, which extracts compact sub-tables by eliminating redundant cells to streamline downstream reasoning. However, existing pruning methods typically rely on sequential revisions driven by unreliable critique signals, often failing to detect the loss of answer-critical data. To address this limitation, we propose TabTrim, a novel table pruning framework which transforms table pruning from sequential revisions to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. TabTrim derives a gold pruning trajectory using the intermediate sub-tables in the execution process of gold SQL queries, and trains a pruner and a verifier to make the step-wise pruning result align with the gold pruning trajectory. During inference, TabTrim performs parallel search to explore multiple candidate pruning trajectories and identify the optimal sub-table. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TabTrim achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tabular reasoning tasks: TabTrim-8B reaches 73.5% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 3.2%, including 79.4% on WikiTQ and 61.2% on TableBench.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang University of Science and Technology of China, Shuangwu Chen, Shenghao Ye University of Science and Technology of China, Yu Guo University of Science and Technology of China, Qirui Chen University of Science and Technology of China, Jingxian Shuai, Yunpeng Hou 等 10 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances LLMs but faces high prefill latency during long-context processing. While KV cache reuse can mitigate this, current methods relying on shallow features or static heuristics often fail to identify critical tokens for recomputation, resulting in generation quality degradation.We have an insight that KV deviations are more pronounced in deep layers.However, directly extracting deep-layer features from the target model is computationally prohibitive. Crucially, we find that the deep-layer features of a lightweight speculative model exhibit strong consistency with the target model in the selection of critical tokens for recomputation.In light of these insights, we propose SpecCache, which employs deep-layer hidden-state norms from a speculative model as a proxy to guide the critical token selection for target large model.Experiments demonstrate that SpecCache outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. Compared to full KV recomputation, it reduces time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 2.17-3.95\times and increases inference throughput by 2.7-5.2\times, with negligible degradation in generation quality relative to full recomputation.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表