# TableZoomer: A Collaborative Agent Framework for Large-scale Table Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01312 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01312/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 48 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08468/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09206/) (2023)
- [TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09174/) (2024)
- [TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19318/) (2024)
- [TableGPT2: A Large Multimodal Model with Tabular Data Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02059/) (2024)
- [AI Flow at the Network Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12469/) (2024)
- [AI Flow: Perspectives, Scenarios, and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12479/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Table Question Answering: Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05270/) (2022)
- [TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04739/) (2024)
- [Positive-incentive Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09541/) (2022)
- [TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10150/) (2024)
- [Variational Positive-incentive Noise: How Noise Benefits Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07651/) (2023)
- [Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12415/) (2025)
- [Enhance Vision-Language Alignment with Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10817/) (2024)
- [Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14215/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Training Report of TeleChat3-MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24157/) (2025)
- [Beyond Rows to Reasoning: Agentic Retrieval for Multimodal Spreadsheet Understanding and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06503/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Knowledge Fusion for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in the table question answering (TQA) task through prompt engineering, they face challenges in industrial applications, including structural heterogeneity, difficulties in target data localization, and bottlenecks in complex reasoning. To address these limitations, this paper presents TableZoomer, a novel LLM-powered, programming-based agent framework. It introduces three key innovations: (1) replacing the original fully verbalized table with structured table schema to bridge the semantic gap and reduce computational complexity; (2) a query-aware table zooming mechanism that dynamically generates sub-table schema through column selection and entity linking, significantly improving target localization efficiency; and (3) a Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) strategy that transforms queries into executable code to mitigate numerical hallucination. Additionally, we integrate the reasoning workflow with the ReAct paradigm to enable iterative reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework maintains the usability advantages while substantially enhancing performance and scalability across tables of varying scales. When implemented with the Qwen3-8B-Instruct LLM, TableZoomer achieves accuracy improvements of 19.34% and 25% over conventional PoT methods on the large-scale DataBench dataset and the small-scale Fact Checking task of TableBench dataset, respectively.