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Beyond Rows to Reasoning: Agentic Retrieval for Multimodal Spreadsheet Understanding and Editing

Anmol Gulati, Sahil Sen, Waqar Sarguroh, Kevin Paul · Mar 6, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics General Human Eval Long Horizon
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts. However, state-of-the-art approaches exclude critical context through single-pass retrieval, lose data resolution through compression, and exceed LLM context windows through naive full-context injection, preventing reliable multi-step reasoning over complex enterprise workbooks. We introduce Beyond Rows to Reasoning (BRTR), a multimodal agentic framework for spreadsheet understanding that replaces single-pass retrieval with an iterative tool-calling loop, supporting end-to-end Excel workflows from complex analysis to structured editing. Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on SpreadsheetLLM, and 32 points on FINCH. We evaluate five multimodal embedding models, identifying NVIDIA NeMo Retriever 1B as the top performer for mixed tabular and visual data, and vary nine LLMs. Ablation experiments confirm that the planner, retrieval, and iterative reasoning each contribute substantially, and cost analysis shows GPT-5.2 achieves the best efficiency-accuracy trade-off. Throughout all evaluations, BRTR maintains full auditability through explicit tool-call traces.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

37/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 60%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Human Eval, Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Frtr Bench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on SpreadsheetLLM, and 32 points on FINCH."

Reported Metrics

strong

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Ablation experiments confirm that the planner, retrieval, and iterative reasoning each contribute substantially, and cost analysis shows GPT-5.2 achieves the best efficiency-accuracy trade-off."

Rater Population

strong

Domain Experts

Helpful for staffing comparability.

"Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on SpreadsheetLLM, and 32 points on FINCH."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Domain Experts
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Human Eval, Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: Long Horizon
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

Frtr-Bench

Reported Metrics

accuracy

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts.
  • However, state-of-the-art approaches exclude critical context through single-pass retrieval, lose data resolution through compression, and exceed LLM context windows through naive full-context injection, preventing reliable multi-step reasoning over complex enterprise workbooks.
  • We introduce Beyond Rows to Reasoning (BRTR), a multimodal agentic framework for spreadsheet understanding that replaces single-pass retrieval with an iterative tool-calling loop, supporting end-to-end Excel workflows from complex analysis to structured editing.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Human evaluation, Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • We introduce Beyond Rows to Reasoning (BRTR), a multimodal agentic framework for spreadsheet understanding that replaces single-pass retrieval with an iterative tool-calling loop, supporting end-to-end Excel workflows from complex analysis…
  • Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on…
  • We evaluate five multimodal embedding models, identifying NVIDIA NeMo Retriever 1B as the top performer for mixed tabular and visual data, and vary nine LLMs.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • We introduce Beyond Rows to Reasoning (BRTR), a multimodal agentic framework for spreadsheet understanding that replaces single-pass retrieval with an iterative tool-calling loop, supporting end-to-end Excel workflows from complex analysis…
  • Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Human Eval, Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Frtr-Bench

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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