Multimodal Table Understanding
Mingyu Zheng, Xinwei Feng, Qingyi Si, Qiaoqiao She, Zheng Lin, Wenbin Jiang, Weiping Wang
Abstract
Although great progress has been made by previous table understanding methods including recent approaches based on large language models (LLMs), they rely heavily on the premise that given tables must be converted into a certain text sequence (such as Markdown or HTML) to serve as model input. However, it is difficult to access such high-quality textual table representations in some real-world scenarios, and table images are much more accessible. Therefore, how to directly understand tables using intuitive visual information is a crucial and urgent challenge for developing more practical applications. In this paper, we propose a new problem, multimodal table understanding, where the model needs to generate correct responses to various table-related requests based on the given table image. To facilitate both the model training and evaluation, we construct a large-scale dataset named MMTab, which covers a wide spectrum of table images, instructions and tasks. On this basis, we develop Table-LLaVA, a generalist tabular multimodal large language model (MLLM), which significantly outperforms recent open-source MLLM baselines on 23 benchmarks under held-in and held-out settings.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.493
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9102–9124
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.493
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mingyu Zheng, Xinwei Feng, Qingyi Si, Qiaoqiao She, Zheng Lin, Wenbin Jiang, and Weiping Wang. 2024. Multimodal Table Understanding. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9102–9124, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Multimodal Table Understanding (Zheng et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.493.pdf