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