TableMind: An Autonomous Programmatic Agent for Tool-Augmented Table Reasoning (2509.06278v1)

Abstract: Table reasoning is crucial for leveraging structured data in domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. While LLMs show promise in multi-step reasoning, purely text-based methods often struggle with the complex numerical computations and fine-grained operations inherently required in this task. Tool-integrated reasoning improves computational accuracy via explicit code execution, yet existing systems frequently rely on rigid patterns, supervised imitation, and lack true autonomous adaptability. In this paper, we present TableMind, an LLM-driven table reasoning agent that (i) autonomously performs multi-turn tool invocation, (ii) writes and executes data-analyzing code in a secure sandbox environment for data analysis and precise numerical reasoning, and (iii) exhibits high-level capabilities such as planning and self-reflection to adapt strategies. To realize these capabilities, we adopt a two-stage fine-tuning paradigm built on top of a powerful pre-trained LLM: supervised fine-tuning on high-quality reasoning trajectories to establish effective tool usage patterns, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning to optimize multi-objective strategies. In particular, we propose Rank-Aware Policy Optimization (RAPO), which increases the update weight of high-quality trajectories when their output probabilities are lower than those of low-quality ones, thereby guiding the model more consistently toward better and more accurate answers. Extensive experiments on several mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that TableMind achieves superior performance compared to competitive baselines, yielding substantial gains in both reasoning accuracy and computational precision.