Open-Domain Table Question Answering (TQA) involves retrieving relevant tables from a large corpus to answer natural language queries. Traditional dense retrieval models, such as DTR and DPR, not only incur high computational costs for large-scale retrieval tasks but also require retraining or fine-tuning on new datasets, limiting their adaptability to evolving domains and knowledge. In this work, we propose **CRAFT**, a zero-shot, cascaded retrieval approach that first uses a sparse retrieval model to filter a subset of candidate tables before applying more computationally expensive dense models as re-rankers.To improve retrieval quality, we enrich table representations with descriptive titles and summaries generated by *Gemini Flash 1.5*, enabling richer semantic matching between queries and tabular structures. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) sparse, dense, and hybrid retrievers on the NQ-Tables dataset. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on the more challenging OTT-QA benchmark, achieving competitive results at higher recall thresholds, where the task requires multi-hop reasoning across both textual passages and relational tables.This work establishes a scalable and adaptable paradigm for table retrieval, bridging the gap between fine-tuned architectures and lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval systems. Code and data are available at: [https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/CRAFT/](https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/CRAFT/)

Generative Language Models rely on autoregressive decoding to produce the output sequence token by token. Many tasks such as preference optimization, require the model to produce task-level output consisting of multiple tokens directly by selecting candidates from a pool as predictions. Determining a task-level prediction from candidates using the ordinary token-level decoding mechanism is constrained by time-consuming decoding and interrupted gradients by discrete token selection. Existing works have been using decoding-free candidate selection methods to obtain candidate probability from initial output logits over vocabulary. Though these estimation methods are widely used, they are not systematically evaluated, especially on end tasks. We introduce an evaluation of a comprehensive collection of decoding-free candidate selection approaches on a comprehensive set of tasks, including five multiple-choice QA tasks with a small candidate pool and four clinical decision tasks with a massive amount of candidates, some with 10k+ options. We evaluate the estimation methods paired with a wide spectrum of foundation LMs covering different architectures, sizes and training paradigms. The results and insights from our analysis inform the future model design.