@inproceedings{lin-etal-2026-logtop,
    title = "{L}og{T}o{P}: Logic Tree-of-Program with Table Instruction-tuned {LLM}s for Controlled Logical Table-to-Text Generation",
    author = "Lin, Yupian  and
      Yu, Guangya  and
      Yuan, Cheng  and
      Du, Huan  and
      Luo, Hui  and
      Bian, Yuang  and
      Liu, Jingping  and
      He, Zhidong  and
      Du, Wen  and
      Ruan, Tong",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.280/",
    pages = "5291--5303",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9",
    abstract = "Logical table-to-text generation aims to generate natural language descriptions that fluently and precisely describe the given table with both surface-level and logic-level fidelity. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in plain text, their proficiency in interpreting and reasoning tabular data is still limited. In this paper, we are the first to comprehensively explore the performance of various LLMs in the logical table-to-text generation task. However, we find that existing LLMs are difficult to achieve satisfactory results in this task. Even worse, existing prompt strategies cannot cope with complex non-chain logical reasoning scenarios on tables. To address the challenges mentioned above, we constructed a new table-related instruction dataset called LogicTableInstruct and instruction-tuned the open-source LLM on this dataset, resulting in the specialized LLM (LogicTableLLaMA-3.1-8B) for table-related tasks. We also introduced a novel reasoning method, Logic Tree-of-Program (LogicToP), to improve the logical reasoning ability of the LLMs on tables. Our extensive experiments on various LLMs demonstrated that LogicToP can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on this task. Our LogicTableLLaMA-3.1-8B model in the 5-shot LogicToP setting achieves state-of-the-art results on the Logic2Text dataset. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/FXLP/LogToP to boost future work on table-related tasks."
}