# TableSeek: Structure-Preserving Agentic Evidence Seeking over Heterogeneous Table Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34157 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34157/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## 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, 26 of 26)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02164/) (2019)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05720/) (2021)
- [HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07347/) (2020)
- [Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09136/) (2025)
- [TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07653/) (2021)
- [Open Question Answering over Tables and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10439/) (2020)
- [SPLADE v2: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10086/) (2021)
- [Jasper and Stella: distillation of SOTA embedding models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19048/) (2024)
- [SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06789/) (2024)
- [Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05242/) (2026)
- [Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Exploring Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09889/) (2024)
- [jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Listwise Document Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25085/) (2025)
- [Resolving Evidence Sparsity: Agentic Context Engineering for Long-Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22850/) (2025)
- [Table Retrieval May Not Necessitate Table-specific Model Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09843/) (2022)
- [Tabular Embedding Model (TEM): Finetuning Embedding Models For Tabular RAG Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01585/) (2024)
- [Tailoring Table Retrieval from a Field-aware Hybrid Matching Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02251/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-domain table retrieval seeks tables that contain sufficient evidence for answering a question or verifying a claim. Yet semantic relevance is often misleading: topically similar tables may lack the required facts, while answer-bearing evidence is often confined to a few cells whose meaning depends on surrounding schema and table context. Heterogeneous schemas, value formats, and serializations further weaken one-shot matching. We present TableSeek, a structure-preserving agentic search framework for heterogeneous table corpora. Instead of ranking tables once, an LLM agent iteratively follows sparse clues, inspects schema-preserving previews, identifies schema- and value-level mismatches, and refines its investigation. TableSeek uses cells and schemas as evidence anchors while retaining complete tables as evidence units, enabling fine-grained localization without losing the context required for interpretation and answerability checking. Without relying on retriever training or a precomputed semantic index, TableSeek produces transparent evidence-seeking trajectories and achieves competitive end-to-end performance against strong retrieval-and-reranking pipelines on heterogeneous table benchmarks. These results suggest that active, structure-preserving evidence seeking is a promising paradigm for open-domain table retrieval.