AutoTQA: Towards Autonomous Tabular Question Answering through Multi-Agent Large Language Models

With the growing significance of data analysis, several studies aim to provide precise answers to users' natural language questions from tables, a task referred to as tabular question answering (TQA). The state-of-the-art TQA approaches are limited to handling only single-table questions. However, real-world TQA problems are inherently complex and frequently involve multiple tables, which poses challenges in directly extending single-table TQA designs to handle multiple tables, primarily due to the limited extensibility of the majority of single-table TQA methods. This paper proposes AutoTQA, a novel Autonomous Tabular Question Answering framework that employs multi-agent large language models (LLMs) across multiple tables from various systems (e.g., TiDB, BigQuery). AutoTQA comprises five agents: the User, responsible for receiving the user's natural language inquiry; the Planner, tasked with creating an execution plan for the user's inquiry; the Engineer, responsible for executing the plan step-by-step; the Executor, provides various execution environments (e.g., text-to-SQL) to fulfill specific tasks assigned by the Engineer; and the Critic, responsible for judging whether to complete the user's natural language inquiry and identifying gaps between the current results and initial tasks. To facilitate the interaction between different agents, we have also devised agent scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, we have developed LinguFlow, an open-source, low-code visual programming tool, to quickly build and debug LLM-based applications, and to accelerate the creation of various external tools and execution environments. We also implemented a series of data connectors, which allows AutoTQA to access various tables from multiple systems. Extensive experiments show that AutoTQA delivers outstanding performance on four representative datasets.