CITBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Interactive Tabular Data Processing with LLMs

Abstract:Tabular data processing is central to data work, and LLM-based assistants have recently shown promising capabilities in supporting such tasks. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on table reasoning under single-turn, fully specified instructions, underrepresenting complex table processing that unfolds through multi-turn interactions with evolving user requirements. To bridge this gap, we introduce CITBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs on interactive tabular data processing. CITBench features a comprehensive taxonomy across four high-level categories--table matching, cleaning, augmentation, and transformation--spanning 18 task types and 1,296 instances curated from datasets across diverse domains. The benchmark supports both offline and online evaluation, where the online setting models multi-turn interactions under constrained operation procedures and structured task scripts, capturing key potential behavioral characteristics of user-in-the-loop tabular data processing. We evaluate a broad suite of open-source and closed-source LLMs on CITBench, revealing a consistent trend: while current models perform well on simple tables and rules, their performance degrades significantly with increasing table complexity, tighter rule dependencies, and noisy multi-turn interaction simulations. These results highlight persistent challenges in understanding, planning, and table-structure awareness for LLMs in extended interactive data processing scenarios.

Databases (cs.DB); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.00018 [cs.DB]

(or arXiv:2608.00018v1 [cs.DB] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.00018 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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