Toward Real-World Table Agents: Capabilities, Workflows, and Design Principles for LLM-based Table Intelligence
It addresses the challenge of handling noisy and heterogeneous tables in domains like finance and healthcare, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing research without introducing new methods.
This survey tackles the problem of automating real-world table tasks, which involve noise and complexity, by analyzing LLM-based Table Agents and identifying a performance gap between academic benchmarks and practical scenarios, especially for open-source models.
Tables are fundamental in domains such as finance, healthcare, and public administration, yet real-world table tasks often involve noise, structural heterogeneity, and semantic complexity--issues underexplored in existing research that primarily targets clean academic datasets. This survey focuses on LLM-based Table Agents, which aim to automate table-centric workflows by integrating preprocessing, reasoning, and domain adaptation. We define five core competencies--C1: Table Structure Understanding, C2: Table and Query Semantic Understanding, C3: Table Retrieval and Compression, C4: Executable Reasoning with Traceability, and C5: Cross-Domain Generalization--to analyze and compare current approaches. In addition, a detailed examination of the Text-to-SQL Agent reveals a performance gap between academic benchmarks and real-world scenarios, especially for open-source models. Finally, we provide actionable insights to improve the robustness, generalization, and efficiency of LLM-based Table Agents in practical settings.