Formula-R1: Incentivizing LLM Reasoning over Complex Tables with Numerical Computation via Formula-Driven Reinforcement Learning

ArXi:2505.23667v3 Announce Type: replace Tables are a fundamental medium for organizing and analyzing data, making table reasoning a critical capability for intelligent systems. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they still struggle with accurate numerical reasoning over tabular data, particularly in complex table settings beyond simple relational lookup. Spreadsheet formulas provide a powerful and expressive interface for executable symbolic operations, enabling rich reasoning patterns that remain largely underexplored by existing LLMs.