Why AI Stumbles on Messy Tables

Kari Jaaskelainen

10 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

AI meets messy spreadsheets

New research shows that large language models (LLMs) struggle when tables are subtly distorted—through small layout or labeling tweaks—even if the data is otherwise standard.

LLMs rarely notice or fix these distortions on their own.
Giving an explicit "watch out for table errors" instruction helps a bit, but not consistently.
The authors built a small, expert-curated benchmark for table question answering that first requires an error-correction step.
Across models, accuracy drops sharply under distortion—by at least 22% even for state-of-the-art systems.

Why it matters: Humans often sanity-check a table before analyzing it. Today's LLMs don't reliably do this unless told. The study highlights a key frontier for AI: learning when and how to realign tabular inputs automatically, without special prompts or preprocessing.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05009v1

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05009v1

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