Spreadsheets are a primary medium for publishing tabular data, yet automatically extracting structured content from them remains difficult due to heterogeneous layouts, diverse file formats, and inconsistent organizational conventions. We address two core tasks in spreadsheet understanding: Cell-Type Classification (CTC), which assigns roles to cells, and Table Detection (TD), which identifies table bounding boxes within sheets.
arXiv:2608. 16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spreadsheets are a primary medium for publishing tabular data, yet automatically extracting structured content from them remains difficult due to heterogeneous layouts, diverse file formats, and inconsistent organizational conventions.
The paper proposes a new framework that uses semantic cell annotation to split spreadsheets into interpretable chunks for large language model (LLM)-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. This approach improves answer generation by providing richer context rather than merely enhancing retrieval accuracy. However, the authors argue that the inherent two‑dimensional, unstructured nature of spreadsheets imposes a hard ceiling on classification‑based methods, suggesting that future work should focus on dimensionality‑reduction techniques to flatten spreadsheets into one‑dimensional text for easier processing by RAG.
arXiv:2605. 05811v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Workbook-scale spreadsheet understanding is increasingly important for language-model-based data analysis agents, but remains challenging because relevant information is often distributed across multiple sheets with heterogeneous schemas, layouts, and implicit relationships.
The paper proposes a new framework that improves spreadsheet chunking for large language model (LLM)-driven retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems by adding semantic cell annotations. This approach outperforms current state‑of‑the‑art methods but is limited by the inherent two‑dimensional, unstructured nature of spreadsheets, which cannot be fully captured by finite classification categories. The authors argue that future progress requires dimensionality‑reduction techniques to flatten spreadsheets into one‑dimensional text, simplifying downstream RAG interpretation and generation.
arXiv:2606. 30410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry.
Spreadsheets are widely used for business analysis, financial modeling, reporting, and decision-making. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate isolated operations such as single-formula generation or local cell edits, and therefore fail to capture end-to-end workflows in realistic business settings.
arXiv:2606. 29955v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spreadsheets are widely used for business analysis, financial modeling, reporting, and decision-making.
arXiv:2606. 13802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work.
arXiv:2608. 01400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular foundation models, driven by in-context learning, have rapidly grown in quality and popularity.
arXiv:2602. 09329v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quality benchmarks are essential for fairly and accurately tracking scientific progress and enabling practitioners to make informed methodological choices.
The paper introduces TEmBed, a unified benchmark for evaluating tabular embeddings across four representation levels—cell, row, column, and table—using a diverse set of models. It demonstrates that the best model depends on the specific task and representation level, providing practical guidance for selecting embeddings in real-world applications. The study aims to facilitate the development of more general-purpose tabular representation models.
arXiv:2606. 09323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular encoders are usually evaluated inside task-specific end-to-end pipelines, so models from different training paradigms are difficult to compare directly even when they operate on similar tabular signals.