# Planning for Success: Exploring LLM Long-term Planning Capabilities in Table Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17005 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17005/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2025.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [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)
- [TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02164/) (2019)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08468/) (2023)
- [TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07653/) (2021)
- [Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02875/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04398/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers: Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13808/) (2023)
- [Can Foundation Models Wrangle Your Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09911/) (2022)
- [TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09206/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06710/) (2022)
- [TABBIE: Pretrained Representations of Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02584/) (2021)
- [TUTA: Tree-based Transformers for Generally Structured Table Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12537/) (2020)
- [Understanding tables with intermediate pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00571/) (2020)
- [DocMath-Eval: Evaluating Math Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Understanding Long and Specialized Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09805/) (2023)
- [TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10150/) (2024)
- [PTab: Using the Pre-trained Language Model for Modeling Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08060/) (2022)
- [OpenTab: Advancing Large Language Models as Open-domain Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14361/) (2024)
- [Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13182/) (2023)
- [CABINET: Content Relevance based Noise Reduction for Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01155/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Table Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09671/) (2025)
- [The Social Cost of Intelligence: Emergence, Propagation, and Amplification of Stereotypical Bias in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10943/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Table understanding is key to addressing challenging downstream tasks such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Recent works have focused on leveraging Chain-of-Thought and question decomposition to solve complex questions requiring multiple operations on tables. However, these methods often suffer from a lack of explicit long-term planning and weak inter-step connections, leading to miss constraints within questions. In this paper, we propose leveraging the long-term planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to enhance table understanding. Our approach enables the execution of a long-term plan, where the steps are tightly interconnected and serve the ultimate goal, an aspect that methods based on Chain-of-Thought and question decomposition lack. In addition, our method effectively minimizes the inclusion of unnecessary details in the process of solving the next short-term goals, a limitation of methods based on Chain-of-Thought. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets.