Reasoning by Commented Code for Table Question Answering

Table Question Answering (TableQA) poses a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) because conventional linearization of tables often disrupts the two-dimensional relationships intrinsic to structured data. Existing methods, which depend on end-to-end answer generation or single-line program queries, typically exhibit limited numerical accuracy and reduced interpretability. This work introduces a commented, step-by-step code-generation framework that incorporates explicit reasoning into the Python program-generation process. The approach decomposes TableQA reasoning into multi-line executable programs with concise natural language comments, thereby promoting clearer reasoning and increasing the likelihood of generating correct code. On the WikiTableQuestions benchmark, the proposed method achieves 70.9% accuracy using Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct, surpassing the Repanda baseline (67.6%). Integrating the proposed framework with a robust end-to-end TableQA model via a lightweight answer-selection mechanism yields further improvements. This combined approach achieves up to 84.3% accuracy on the WikiTableQuestions benchmark.