Lune

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.

Ask Lune

Ask anything. The answer quotes the paper.

Lune reads all of it and the papers around it, then shows you the passages behind every answer.

Questions to start from

Lune answers from

the full paper · related work

Get the answer

Free to start. No credit card required.

Builds on16

  1. TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact VerificationWenhu Chen, Hongmin Wang, Jianshu Chen, Yunkai Zhang et al.ICLR 2020 · 674 citations
  2. Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark EvaluationDawei Gao, Haibin Wang, Yaliang Li, Xiuyu Sun et al.VLDB 2024 · 609 citations
  3. RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion SystemsTianyang Liu, Canwen Xu, Julian J. McAuleyICLR 2024 · 338 citations
  4. HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual DataWenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong et al.EMNLP Findings 2020 · 205 citations
  5. PubTables-1M: Towards comprehensive table extraction from unstructured documentsBrandon Smock, Rohith Pesala, Robin AbrahamCVPR 2022 · 125 citations

Related papers

  1. LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context MultitasksYushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng et al.ACL 2025
  2. Probing How Scalable Table Data Enhances General Long-Context ReasoningHuaibing Xie, Guoliang Zhao, Yang Liu, Shihan Dou et al.ICML 2026
  3. LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context UnderstandingYushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu et al.ACL 2024 · 94 citations
  4. ınftyBench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K TokensXinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Zihang Xu et al.ACL 2024
  5. RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table AnalysisPengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye et al.ACL Findings 2025 · 2 citations
Dusk over the sea between two cliffs drawn in fine vertical lines