Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced QA tasks through in-context learning but often suffer from hallucinations. Attributing supporting evidence grounded in source documents has been explored for unstructured text in the past. However, tabular data present unique challenges for attribution due to ambiguities (e.g., abbreviations, domain-specific terms), complex header hierarchies, and the difficulty in interpreting individual table cells without row and column context. We introduce a new task, Fine-grained Structured Table Attribution (FAST-Tab), to generate row and column-level attributions supporting LLM-generated answers. We present MATSA, a novel LLM-based Multi-Agent system capable of post-hoc Table Structure Attribution to help users visually interpret factual claims derived from tables. MATSA augments tabular entities with descriptive context about structure, metadata, and numerical trends to semantically retrieve relevant rows and columns corresponding to facts in an answer. Additionally, we propose TabCite, a diverse benchmark designed to evaluate the FAST-Tab task on tables with complex layouts sourced from Wikipedia and business PDF documents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MATSA significantly outperforms SOTA baselines on TabCite, achieving an 8-13% improvement in F1 score. Qualitative user studies show that MATSA helps increase user trust in Generative AI by providing enhanced explainability for LLM-assisted table QA and enables professionals to be more productive by saving time on fact-checking LLM-generated answers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user’s mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA. Our code and datasets will be released soon on Github.

Modern instruction-tuned models have become highly capable in text generation tasks such as summarization, and are expected to be released at a steady pace. In practice one may now wish to choose confidently, but with minimal effort, the best performing summarization model when applied to a new domain or purpose. In this work, we empirically investigate the test sample size necessary to select a preferred model in the context of news summarization. Empirical results reveal that comparative evaluation converges quickly for both automatic and human evaluation, with clear preferences for a system emerging from under 100 examples. The human preference data allows us to quantify how well automatic scores can reproduce preference rankings across a variety of downstream summarization tasks. We find that, while automatic metrics are stable at smaller sample sizes, only some automatic metrics are able to moderately predict model win rates according to human preference.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format for distributing digital documents. Datasets on PDF reading behaviors and interactions remain limited due to the challenges of instrumenting PDF readers for these data collection tasks. We present ATLAS, a data collection tool designed to better support researchers in collecting rich PDF-centric datasets from users. ATLAS supports researchers in programmatically creating a user interface for data collection that is ready to share with annotators. It includes a toolkit and an extensible schema to easily customize the data collection tasks for a variety of purposes, allowing collection of PDF annotations (e.g., highlights, drawings) as well as reading behavior analytics (e.g., page scroll, text selections). We open-source ATLAS1 to support future research efforts and review use cases of ATLAS that showcase our system’s broad applicability.

Digital documents, such as PDFs, are vital in business workflows, enabling communication, documentation, and collaboration. Handling PDFs can involve navigating complex workflows and numerous tools (e.g., comprehension, annotation, editing), which can be tedious and time-consuming for users. We introduce DocPilot, an AI-assisted document workflow Copilot system capable of understanding user intent and executing tasks accordingly to help users streamline their workflows. DocPilot undertakes intelligent orchestration of various tools through LLM prompting in four steps: (1) Task plan generation, (2) Task plan verification and self-correction, (3) Multi-turn User Feedback, and (4) Task Plan Execution via Code Generation and Error log-based Code Self-Revision. The primary goal of this system is to free the user from the intricacies of document editing, enabling them to focus on the creative aspects and enrich their document management experience.