Reasoning by Commented Code for Table Question Answering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00543v1
• Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2026 06:16:35 GMT
• Title: Reasoning by Commented Code for Table Question Answering
• Authors: Seho Pyo, Jiheon Seok, Jaejin Lee,
• Abstract summary: Table Question Answering (TableQA) poses a significant challenge for large language models.<n>Existing methods, which depend on end-to-end answer generation or single-line program queries, exhibit limited numerical accuracy and reduced interpretability.<n>This work introduces a commented, step-by-step code-generation framework that incorporates explicit reasoning into the Python program-generation process.
• Score: 2.497926557563177
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Table Question Answering (TableQA) poses a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) because conventional linearization of tables often disrupts the two-dimensional relationships intrinsic to structured data. Existing methods, which depend on end-to-end answer generation or single-line program queries, typically exhibit limited numerical accuracy and reduced interpretability. This work introduces a commented, step-by-step code-generation framework that incorporates explicit reasoning into the Python program-generation process. The approach decomposes TableQA reasoning into multi-line executable programs with concise natural language comments, thereby promoting clearer reasoning and increasing the likelihood of generating correct code. On the WikiTableQuestions benchmark, the proposed method achieves 70.9\% accuracy using Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct, surpassing the Repanda baseline (67.6\%). Integrating the proposed framework with a robust end-to-end TableQA model via a lightweight answer-selection mechanism yields further improvements. This combined approach achieves up to 84.3\% accuracy on the WikiTableQuestions benchmark.

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