Xinyi He

Lingbo Li, Tianle Li, Xinyi He et al.

Intelligent analysis and visualization of tables use techniques to automatically recommend useful knowledge from data, thus freeing users from tedious multi-dimension data mining. While many studies have succeeded in automating recommendations through rules or machine learning, it is difficult to generalize expert knowledge and provide explainable recommendations. In this paper, we present the recommendation of conditional formatting for the first time, together with chart recommendation, to exemplify intelligent table analysis. We propose analytical semantics over tables to uncover common analysis pattern behind user-created analyses. Here, we design analytical semantics by separating data focus from user intent, which extract the user motivation from data and human perspective respectively. Furthermore, the ASTA framework is designed by us to apply analytical semantics to multiple automated recommendations. ASTA framework extracts data features by designing signatures based on expert knowledge, and enables data referencing at field- (chart) or cell-level (conditional formatting) with pre-trained models. Experiments show that our framework achieves recall at top 1 of 62.86% on public chart corpora, outperforming the best baseline about 14%, and achieves 72.31% on the collected corpus ConFormT, validating that ASTA framework is effective in providing accurate and explainable recommendations.

Xinyi He, Yihao Liu, Mengyu Zhou et al.

Tabular data are crucial in many fields and their understanding by large language models (LLMs) under high parameter efficiency paradigm is important. However, directly applying parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to tabular tasks presents significant challenges, particularly in terms of better table serialization and the representation of two-dimensional structured information within a one-dimensional sequence. To address this, we propose TableLoRA, a module designed to improve LLMs' understanding of table structure during PEFT. It incorporates special tokens for serializing tables with special token encoder and uses 2D LoRA to encode low-rank information on cell positions. Experiments on four tabular-related datasets demonstrate that TableLoRA consistently outperforms vanilla LoRA and surpasses various table encoding methods tested in control experiments. These findings reveal that TableLoRA, as a table-specific LoRA, enhances the ability of LLMs to process tabular data effectively, especially in low-parameter settings, demonstrating its potential as a robust solution for handling table-related tasks.

Haoyu Dong, Zhoujun Cheng, Xinyi He et al.

Since a vast number of tables can be easily collected from web pages, spreadsheets, PDFs, and various other document types, a flurry of table pre-training frameworks have been proposed following the success of text and images, and they have achieved new state-of-the-arts on various tasks such as table question answering, table type recognition, column relation classification, table search, formula prediction, etc. To fully use the supervision signals in unlabeled tables, a variety of pre-training objectives have been designed and evaluated, for example, denoising cell values, predicting numerical relationships, and implicitly executing SQLs. And to best leverage the characteristics of (semi-)structured tables, various tabular language models, particularly with specially-designed attention mechanisms, have been explored. Since tables usually appear and interact with free-form text, table pre-training usually takes the form of table-text joint pre-training, which attracts significant research interests from multiple domains. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive review of different model designs, pre-training objectives, and downstream tasks for table pre-training, and we further share our thoughts and vision on existing challenges and future opportunities.