No Universal Prompt: Unifying Reasoning through Adaptive Prompting for Temporal Table Reasoning.

Abhishek Rajgaria, Kushagra Dixit, Mayank Vyas, Harshavardhan Kalalbandi, Dan Roth, Vivek Gupta


Abstract
Temporal Table Reasoning poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring effective reasoning to extract relevant insights. Despite existence of multiple prompting methods, their impact on table reasoning remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, model performance varies drastically across different table and context structures, making it difficult to determine an optimal approach. This work investigates multiple prompting technique on diverse table types to determine that performance depends on factors such as entity type, table structure, requirement of additional context and question complexity, with “NO” single method consistently outperforming others. To address this, we introduce SEAR, an adaptive prompting framework inspired by human reasoning that dynamically adjusts to context and integrates structured reasoning. SEAR_Unified, its cost-efficient variant. We also demonstrate that optional table refactoring (preprocessing) enhances both approaches when tables lack structural consistency. Our results demonstrate that SEAR prompts achieve superior performance across all table types compared to baseline prompting techniques
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.150
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2800–2821
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.150/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhishek Rajgaria, Kushagra Dixit, Mayank Vyas, Harshavardhan Kalalbandi, Dan Roth, and Vivek Gupta. 2025. No Universal Prompt: Unifying Reasoning through Adaptive Prompting for Temporal Table Reasoning.. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2800–2821, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
No Universal Prompt: Unifying Reasoning through Adaptive Prompting for Temporal Table Reasoning. (Rajgaria et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.150.pdf