FACTS: Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization via Offline Template Generation
Ye Yuan · Amin Shabani · Siqi Liu
Abstract
Query-focused table summarization aims to generate concise textual summaries of tabular data conditioned on a specific user query, enabling users to access relevant insights over large tables. However, existing approaches struggle to meet real-world requirements: fine-tuned LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and direct LLM summarization face token-limit constraints, high computational costs, and privacy risks, while decomposition-based strategies and manual template design are labor-intensive and non-scalable. To address these challenges, we introduce FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS leverages LLM-based agentic workflows to automatically generate offline templates, where each offline template consists of schema-aware SQL queries and a Jinja$2$ template derived from a given user query and table schema. Once generated, these offline templates can be efficiently reused across new tables, making summarization both scalable and cost-effective. Our framework achieves three advantages: fast summarization through lightweight SQL execution and reusable offline templates which avoid repeated LLM inference, accurate summaries by grounding outputs in precise query results rather than free-form text generation, and privacy-compliant deployment since only table schema is exposed to the LLM. We benchmark FACTS on QTSumm and QFMTS, demonstrating promising improvements over selected baselines.
Chat is not available.
Successful Page Load