EMNLP Findings2025
LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains
Liyao Li, Jiaming Tian, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao
Abstract
We introduce LongTableBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. It comprises 5,950 QA instances spanning 7 table formats (e.g., Markdown, HTML, SQL), 18 domains, and input lengths up to 128K tokens, including multi-turn and multi-table settings. To ensure data quality, we combine symbolic supervision, crossmodel validation, and human review. Evaluating 52 LLMs-including general-purpose, table-specific, and reasoning-enhanced models-reveals that only the strongest models maintain robust performance under increasing context lengths and format diversity. We further show that end-to-end models outperform compression-based approaches, especially on tasks requiring semantic integration. LongTableBench provides a rigorous, scalable testbed for advancing long-context tabular understanding and highlights key limitations in current LLMs' structural and reasoning capabilities. The code and data are available at https: //github.com/liyaooi/LongTableBench.
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