English

FT-RAG: A Fine-grained Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Complex Table Reasoning

Computation and Language 2026-05-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding responses in external knowledge during inference. However, conventiona RAG systems under-perform on structured tabular data, largely due to coarse retrieval granularity and insufficient table semantic comprehension. To address these limitations, we introduce FT-RAG, a fine-grained framework that employs knowledge association by decomposing tables into entry-level semantic units to construct a structured graph. FT-RAG employs a structural neighbor expansion mechanism to find semantically connected entities during graph retrieval, followed by multi-modal fusion to consolidate the context of table retrieval results. Further, to address the scarcity of specialized datasets in this domain, we introduce Multi-Table-RAG-Lib, a benchmark comprising 9870 QA pairs with high complexity and difficulty, curated to demand multi-table integration and text-table information fusion for reasoning. FT-RAG surpasses top-performing baselines across all metrics, achieving a 23.5\% and 59.2\% improvement in table-level and cell-level Hit Rates, respectively. Generation performance also sees a remarkable 62.2\% increase in exact value accuracy recall. These metrics verify the framework's effectiveness in factual grounding across both pure tabular and heterogeneous table-text contexts. Therefore, our method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance for complex reasoning over mixed-modality documents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.01495,
  title  = {FT-RAG: A Fine-grained Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Complex Table Reasoning},
  author = {Zebin Guo and Weidong Geng and Ruichen Mao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01495},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:46:49.080Z