Tables, typically two-dimensional and structured to store large amounts of
data, are essential in daily activities like database queries, spreadsheet
calculations, and generating reports from web tables. Automating these
table-centric tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs) offers significant public
benefits, garnering interest from academia and industry. This survey provides
an extensive overview of table tasks, encompassing not only the traditional
areas like table question answering (Table QA) and fact verification, but also
newly emphasized aspects such as table manipulation and advanced table data
analysis. Additionally, it goes beyond the early strategies of pre-training and
fine-tuning small language models, to include recent paradigms in LLM usage.
The focus here is particularly on instruction-tuning, prompting, and
agent-based approaches within the realm of LLMs. Finally, we highlight several
challenges, ranging from private deployment and efficient inference to the
development of extensive benchmarks for table manipulation and advanced data
analysis.

通过对大型语言模型（LLMs）在表格任务方面的应用进行全面的概述，本文除了涵盖传统的表格问答（Table QA）和事实验证等领域，还强调了表格操作和高级表格数据分析等新方面，并介绍了 LLMs 中的指导调优、提示和基于代理的方法，同时也提出了私有部署、高效推理和开发广泛基准的相关挑战。