TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables

TL;DR

TableVision introduces a large-scale benchmark for spatially grounded reasoning over complex hierarchical tables, addressing perception bottlenecks in multimodal large language models and improving reasoning accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a new dataset and framework that explicitly couples spatial ground truths with logical deductions to enhance MLLMs' reasoning over complex tables.

Findings

Explicit spatial constraints improve reasoning performance.

Two-stage decoupled framework achieves 12.3% accuracy gain.

Benchmark stratifies tasks into perception, reasoning, and analysis levels.

Abstract

Structured tables are essential for conveying high-density information in professional domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Despite the progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), reasoning performance remains limited for complex tables with hierarchical layouts. In this paper, we identify a critical Perception Bottleneck through quantitative analysis. We find that as task complexity scales, the number of involved discrete visual regions increases disproportionately. This processing density leads to an internal "Perceptual Overload," where MLLMs struggle to maintain accurate spatial attention during implicit generation. To address this bottleneck, we introduce TableVision, a large-scale, trajectory-aware benchmark designed for spatially grounded reasoning. TableVision stratifies tabular tasks into three cognitive levels (Perception, Reasoning, and Analysis) across 13 sub-categories. By utilizing a rendering-based deterministic grounding pipeline, the dataset explicitly couples multi-step logical deductions with pixel-perfect spatial ground truths, comprising 6,799 high-fidelity reasoning trajectories. Our empirical results, supported by diagnostic probing, demonstrate that explicit spatial constraints significantly recover the reasoning potential of MLLMs. Furthermore, our two-stage decoupled framework achieves a robust 12.3% overall accuracy improvement on the test set. TableVision provides a rigorous testbed and a fresh perspective on the synergy between perception and logic in document understanding.