Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs

Specifically, we investigate Recent years have witnessed an explosion of Large several research questions, including the effectiveness Language Models (LLMs), with impressive performance of image-based representation of tabular on various Natural Language Processing data and how different text-based or imagebased (NLP) tasks (Brown et al., 2020; Touvron et al., prompt methods affect LLMs' performance 2023; Team et al., 2023). Research to date has on table-related tasks. In addition, we provide analysis examined the performance of LLMs for various and hypothesis of LLMs' behaviors. Our findings aspects and abilities (Bang et al., 2023b; Bubeck include: et al., 2023; Akter et al., 2023), but their effectiveness on structured data such as tables is less explored. LLMs maintain decent performance when we Unlike unstructured text, tables are systematically use image-based table representations. Sometimes, organized structures of a large amount of image-based table representations can information. This characteristic makes tabular make LLMs perform better.