CITBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Interactive Tabular Data Processing with LLMs
Zihan Nan, Yang Gu, Wei Liu, Xi Yan, Zhou Liu, Hao Liang, Wentao Zhang
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.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.