Table-Critic: A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Criticism and Refinement in Table Reasoning

Peiying Yu, Guoxin Chen, Jingjing Wang


Abstract
Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle with table reasoning tasks, particularly in maintaining consistency throughout multi-step reasoning processes. While existing approaches have explored various decomposition strategies, they often lack effective mechanisms to identify and correct errors in intermediate reasoning steps, leading to cascading error propagation. To address these issues, we propose Table-Critic, a novel multi-agent framework that facilitates collaborative criticism and iterative refinement of the reasoning process until convergence to correct solutions. Our framework consists of four specialized agents: a Judge for error identification, a Critic for comprehensive critiques, a Refiner for process improvement, and a Curator for pattern distillation. To effectively deal with diverse and unpredictable error types, we introduce a self-evolving template tree that systematically accumulates critique knowledge through experience-driven learning and guides future reflections. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that Table-Critic achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and error correction rates while maintaining computational efficiency and lower solution degradation rate.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.853
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17432–17451
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.853/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peiying Yu, Guoxin Chen, and Jingjing Wang. 2025. Table-Critic: A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Criticism and Refinement in Table Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 17432–17451, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Table-Critic: A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Criticism and Refinement in Table Reasoning (Yu et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.853.pdf