# End-to-End Table Question Answering via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 25 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG robustness and adaptive retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-robustness-and-adaptive-retrieval/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07347/) (2020)
- [Open Question Answering over Tables and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10439/) (2020)
- [SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Knowledge-Enhanced Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04389/) (2020)
- [Open Domain Question Answering over Tables via Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12011/) (2021)
- [UniK-QA: Unified Representations of Structured and Unstructured Knowledge for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14610/) (2020)
- [AIT-QA: Question Answering Dataset over Complex Tables in the Airline Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12944/) (2021)
- [Capturing Row and Column Semantics in Transformer Based Question Answering over Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08303/) (2021)
- [Robust Retrieval Augmented Generation for Zero-shot Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13934/) (2021)
- [Grammar-based Neural Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13326/) (2019)
- [Ad Hoc Table Retrieval using Semantic Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06159/) (2018)
- [Multi-modal Retrieval of Tables and Texts Using Tri-encoder Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04049/) (2021)
- [CLTR: An End-to-End, Transformer-Based System for Cell Level Table Retrieval and Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04441/) (2021)
- [Content-Based Table Retrieval for Web Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02427/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11049/) (2023)
- [Database-Augmented Query Representation for Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16013/) (2024)
- [NAPG: Non-Autoregressive Program Generation for Hybrid Tabular-Textual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03462/) (2022)
- [Beyond Extraction: Contextualising Tabular Data for Efficient Summarisation by Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02333/) (2024)
- [Pretrained deep models outperform GBDTs in Learning-To-Rank under label scarcity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00177/) (2023)
- [Reliable Academic Conference Question Answering: A Study Based on Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13028/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Table Representations to Answer Questions from Tables in Documents : A Case Study using 3GPP Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17008/) (2024)
- [Entity Embeddings : Perspectives Towards an Omni-Modality Era for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18390/) (2023)
- [Assisting humans in complex comparisons: automated information comparison at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04351/) (2024)
- [Semantically Similar, Logically Distinct: Diagnosing the Semantic-Answerability Gap in Table RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17742/) (2026)
- [Open Tabular Insight Extraction: Where Do We Stand, and Where Should We Go?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07629/) (2026)
- [Mapping the RAG Landscape: A Four Axis Taxonomy of Efficiency, Defense, Interactivity, and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01936/) (2026)
- [VIGIL: Verifier-Informed Gated Improvement Loop for Spreadsheet Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04287/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing end-to-end Table Question Answering (Table QA) models consist of a two-stage framework with a retriever to select relevant table candidates from a corpus and a reader to locate the correct answers from table candidates. Even though the accuracy of the reader models is significantly improved with the recent transformer-based approaches, the overall performance of such frameworks still suffers from the poor accuracy of using traditional information retrieval techniques as retrievers. To alleviate this problem, we introduce T-RAG, an end-to-end Table QA model, where a non-parametric dense vector index is fine-tuned jointly with BART, a parametric sequence-to-sequence model to generate answer tokens. Given any natural language question, T-RAG utilizes a unified pipeline to automatically search through a table corpus to directly locate the correct answer from the table cells. We apply T-RAG to recent open-domain Table QA benchmarks and demonstrate that the fine-tuned T-RAG model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both the end-to-end Table QA and the table retrieval tasks.