QUIETT: Query-Independent Table Transformation for Robust Reasoning

Gaurav Najpande, Tampu Ravi Kumar, Manan Roy Choudhury, Neha Valeti, Yanjie Fu, Vivek Gupta


Abstract
Real-world tables often contain schema inconsistencies, heterogeneous value formats, and implicit relational structures that degrade table reasoning and question answering. Existing approaches address these issues at query time, repeating normalization and restructuring for every new question and producing representations that do not generalize to unseen queries. We introduce QuIeTT, a transform-first, query-later framework that converts each raw table into a single SQL-ready canonical representation before any evaluation query is observed, under three constraints: no evaluation query access, information preservation, and single-table reuse. QuIeTT operates through a three-stage pipeline: issue probing, where synthetic queries surface structural deficiencies such as ambiguous schemas and heterogeneous formats; plan generation; and structured execution. Experiments on four benchmarks across five model families show consistent improvements over strong baselines in both direct prompting and agentic reasoning paradigms, with particularly strong gains on a manually annotated challenge set of structurally diverse unseen questions.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1717
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
36675–36696
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1717/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaurav Najpande, Tampu Ravi Kumar, Manan Roy Choudhury, Neha Valeti, Yanjie Fu, and Vivek Gupta. 2026. QUIETT: Query-Independent Table Transformation for Robust Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 36675–36696, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QUIETT: Query-Independent Table Transformation for Robust Reasoning (Najpande et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1717.pdf