Tabular data is widely used in fields such as finance and healthcare. Traditional tree-based models are prevalent for tabular prediction tasks due to their ability to handle heterogeneous features. However, their heavy reliance on feature engineering limits both their generalizability and their human-readable interpretability. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) naturally provide intermediate reasoning steps, thus offering greater transparency in decision-making. Nevertheless, LLMs often fail to match the predictive performance of tree-based models on tabular data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning (LogGER) framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs. Specifically, we reformulate the traditional decision tree as a human-readable logic graph, which explicitly models the causal relationships between features and targets. This logic graph is automatically constructed using LLMs based on data priors and serves as the foundation for LogGER. To fully leverage the logic graph, we further introduce a logic-graph-guided process supervision approach, which evaluates and enhances the quality of LLM’s intermediate reasoning steps using logic-graph-aided process reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LogGER consistently outperforms both tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLM methods on a variety of tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. Due to the inherent uncertainty within LLMs, they often produce incorrect labels for difficult samples, severely compromising the data quality for downstream applications. Motivated by ambiguity aversion in human behaviors, we propose a novel candidate annotation paradigm wherein large language models are encouraged to output all possible labels when incurring uncertainty. To ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks, we develop a teacher-student framework CanDist that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM). We further provide a rigorous justification demonstrating that distilling candidate annotations from the teacher LLM offers superior theoretical guarantees compared to directly using single annotations. Extensive experiments across six text classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/MingxuanXia/CanDist.