# FACTS: Table Summarization via Offline Template Generation with Agentic Workflows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13920 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13920/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 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, 18 of 18)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (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)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers: Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13808/) (2023)
- [FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00369/) (2021)
- [HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06712/) (2021)
- [Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10404/) (2020)
- [OmniTab: Pretraining with Natural and Synthetic Data for Few-shot Table-based Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03637/) (2022)
- [ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12374/) (2022)
- [FORTAP: Using Formulas for Numerical-Reasoning-Aware Table Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07323/) (2021)
- [Interpretable LLM-based Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12386/) (2024)
- [PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12697/) (2022)
- [QFMTS: Generating Query-Focused Summaries over Multi-Table Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05109/) (2024)
- [Beyond Natural Language Plans: Structure-Aware Planning for Query-Focused Table Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22829/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CARE: Privacy-Compliant Agentic Reasoning with Evidence Discordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01113/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Query-focused table summarization requires generating natural language summaries of tabular data conditioned on a user query, enabling users to access insights beyond fact retrieval. Existing approaches face key limitations: table-to-text models require costly fine-tuning and struggle with complex reasoning, prompt-based LLM methods suffer from token-limit and efficiency issues while exposing sensitive data, and prior agentic pipelines often rely on decomposition, planning, or manual templates that lack robustness and scalability. To mitigate these issues, we introduce an agentic workflow, FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS produces offline templates, consisting of SQL queries and Jinja2 templates, which can be rendered into natural language summaries and are reusable across multiple tables sharing the same schema. It enables fast summarization through reusable offline templates, accurate outputs with executable SQL queries, and privacy compliance by sending only table schemas to LLMs. Evaluations on widely-used benchmarks show that FACTS consistently outperforms baseline methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-world query-focused table summarization. Our code is available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/FACTS.