不同格式的表格序列化会导致检索结果差异,本文通过平均嵌入中心提升稳定性。
Improving Robustness of Tabular Retrieval via Representational Stability

- 用多种格式序列化表格,取嵌入中心作为统一目标
- 在多个模型和数据集上,中心嵌入优于单一格式
- 轻量级适配器可进一步提升稠密检索鲁棒性
基于Transformer的表格检索系统将结构化表格扁平化为词元序列,导致检索结果对序列化方式敏感,即使语义不变。我们发现,语义等价的序列化格式(如csv、tsv、html、markdown、ddl)在多个基准和检索器家族中会产生显著不同的嵌入和检索结果。为此,我们将序列化嵌入视为共享语义信号的噪声视图,以其中心点作为标准目标表示。实验表明,中心平均能有效抑制格式特异性偏差,在格式引起的偏移跨表不同时,可恢复共有的语义内容。在MPNet、BGE-M3、ReasonIR和SPLADE上,中心表示在成对比较中整体表现更优。我们还引入一个轻量级残差瓶颈适配器,作用于冻结编码器之上,将单格式嵌入映射至中心目标,同时保留方差并施加协方差正则化。该适配器提升了多种稠密检索器的鲁棒性,但对稀疏词法检索提升较弱。结果表明,序列化敏感是检索波动的主要来源,并展示了后处理几何校正对实现格式无关表格检索的潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Transformer-based table retrieval systems flatten structured tables into token sequences, making retrieval sensitive to the choice of serialization even when table semantics remain unchanged. We show that semantically equivalent serializations, such as $\texttt{csv}$, $\texttt{tsv}$, $\texttt{html}$, $\texttt{markdown}$, and $\texttt{ddl}$, can produce substantially different embeddings and retrieval results across multiple benchmarks and retriever families. To address this instability, we treat serialization embedding as noisy views of a shared semantic signal and use its centroid as a canonical target representation. We show that centroid averaging suppresses format-specific variation and can recover the semantic content common to different serializations when format-induced shifts differ across tables. Empirically, centroid representations outrank individual formats in aggregate pairwise comparisons across $\texttt{MPNet}$, $\texttt{BGE-M3}$, $\texttt{ReasonIR}$, and $\texttt{SPLADE}$. We further introduce a lightweight residual bottleneck adapter on top of a frozen encoder that maps single-serialization embeddings towards centroid targets while preserving variance and enforcing covariance regularization. The adapter improves robustness for several dense retrievers, though gains are model-dependent and weaker for sparse lexical retrieval. These results identify serialization sensitivity as a major source of retrieval variance and show the promise of post hoc geometric correction for serialization-invariant table retrieval.
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