# TableDART: Dynamic Adaptive Multi-Modal Routing for Table Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06607/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14610/) (2022)
- [InternLM-XComposer: A Vision-Language Large Model for Advanced Text-image Comprehension and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15112/) (2023)
- [FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00369/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09206/) (2023)
- [Uni-Perceiver: Pre-training Unified Architecture for Generic Perception for Zero-shot and Few-shot Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01522/) (2021)
- [HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06712/) (2021)
- [Table Meets LLM: Can Large Language Models Understand Structured Table Data? A Benchmark and Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13062/) (2023)
- [INFOTABS: Inference on Tables as Semi-structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06117/) (2020)
- [EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07128/) (2024)

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

- [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)
- [FinSAgent: Corpus-Aligned Multi-Agent RAG Framework for Evidence-Grounded SEC Filing Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18102/) (2026)
- [A Table Is Worth 64 Tokens: Pixel-level Compression for Multi-Table Document Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26949/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling semantic and structural information from tabular data remains a core challenge for effective table understanding. Existing Table-as-Text approaches flatten tables for large language models (LLMs), but lose crucial structural cues, while Table-as-Image methods preserve structure yet struggle with precise semantics. Recent Table-as-Multimodality strategies attempt to combine textual and visual views, but they (1) statically process both modalities for every query-table pair within large multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), inevitably introducing redundancy and even conflicts, and (2) depend on costly fine-tuning of MLLMs. In light of this, we propose TableDART, a training-efficient framework that integrates multimodal views by reusing pretrained single-modality models. TableDART introduces a lightweight 2.59M-parameter MLP gating network that dynamically selects the optimal path (Text-only, Image-only, or Fusion) for each table-query pair, reducing redundancy and avoiding conflicts that arise when textual and visual views of the same table provide inconsistent cues. By routing to the most appropriate view, our framework improves both accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we propose a novel agent to mediate cross-modal knowledge integration by analyzing outputs from text- and image-based models, either selecting the best result or synthesizing a new answer through reasoning. This design avoids the prohibitive costs of full MLLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks show that TableDART establishes new state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, surpassing the strongest baseline by an average of 4.02%. The code is available at: https://github.com/xiaobo-xing/TableDART.