What to Keep and What to Drop: Adaptive Table Filtering Framework
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from degraded table reasoning performance due to input-length constraints, hindering effective processing of long, wide tables. Method: We propose Adaptive Table Filtering (ATF), a plug-and-play framework that requires no model fine-tuning. ATF dynamically identifies and retains query-relevant table regions via question-aware column semantic description generation, hierarchical clustering, and sparse–dense vector alignment scoring. Its modular design enables cross-task adaptive balancing between information preservation and structural simplification. Contribution/Results: ATF prunes ~70% of table cells on average, significantly improving reasoning accuracy across diverse TableQA benchmarks. Only in rare cases requiring full-table structural understanding does performance marginally decline. Crucially, ATF is the first approach to jointly model LLM-driven semantic comprehension with interpretable, structured filtering—achieving strong efficiency, task-agnostic generalizability, and parameter-free transferability.