Decoupling Skeleton and Flesh: Efficient Multimodal Table Reasoning with Disentangled Alignment and Structure-aware Guidance

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03491v1
• Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:08:31 GMT
• Title: Decoupling Skeleton and Flesh: Efficient Multimodal Table Reasoning with Disentangled Alignment and Structure-aware Guidance
• Authors: Yingjie Zhu, Xuefeng Bai, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Youcheng Pan, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Min Zhang,
• Abstract summary: Reasoning over table images remains challenging for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) due to complex layouts and tightly coupled structure-content information.<n>Existing solutions often depend on expensive supervised training, reinforcement learning, or external tools, limiting efficiency and scalability.<n>This work addresses a key question: how to adapt LVLMs to table reasoning with minimal annotation and no external tools?
• Score: 43.49944599088126
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reasoning over table images remains challenging for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) due to complex layouts and tightly coupled structure-content information. Existing solutions often depend on expensive supervised training, reinforcement learning, or external tools, limiting efficiency and scalability. This work addresses a key question: how to adapt LVLMs to table reasoning with minimal annotation and no external tools? Specifically, we first introduce DiSCo, a Disentangled Structure-Content alignment framework that explicitly separates structural abstraction from semantic grounding during multimodal alignment, efficiently adapting LVLMs to tables structures. Building on DiSCo, we further present Table-GLS, a Global-to-Local Structure-guided reasoning framework that performs table reasoning via structured exploration and evidence-grounded inference. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our framework efficiently enhances LVLM's table understanding and reasoning capabilities, particularly generalizing to unseen table structures.

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