RSAT: Structured Attribution Makes Small Language Models Faithful Table Reasoners

📰 ArXiv cs.AI

arXiv:2605.00199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model answers a table question, users have no way to verify which cells informed which reasoning steps. We introduce RSAT, a method that trains small language models (SLMs, 1-8B) to produce step-by-step reasoning with cell-level citations grounded in table evidence. Phase 1 (SFT) teaches a structured JSON output format from verified reasoning traces. Phase 2 (GRPO) optimizes a composite reward centered on NLI-based faithfulness, a

Published 5 May 2026

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Title: RSAT: Structured Attribution Makes Small Language Models Faithful Table Reasoners

Abstract:
arXiv:2605.00199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model answers a table question, users have no way to verify which cells informed which reasoning steps. We introduce RSAT, a method that trains small language models (SLMs, 1-8B) to produce step-by-step reasoning with cell-level citations grounded in table evidence. Phase 1 (SFT) teaches a structured JSON output format from verified reasoning traces. Phase 2 (GRPO) optimizes a composite reward centered on NLI-based faithfulness, a
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