Towards Probabilistic Question Answering Over Tabular Data

Abstract

Progress in question answering (QA) over tabular data has enabled reliable factual retrieval from relational tables. However, many real-world questions are probabilistic, requiring reasoning under uncertainty and latent conditional dependencies that are not directly stored in individual cells. We introduce LUCARIO, a large-scale benchmark for probabilistic QA over real-world tabular datasets, covering diverse domains, dependency patterns, and natural language variations. We propose Auto-BN, a fully automatic neuro-symbolic framework that induces a Bayesian Network from raw tables, translates natural-language questions into formal probabilistic queries, and performs exact inference. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones show that Auto-BN consistently outperforms NL2SQL, retrieval-based, and premise-based baselines, while maintaining a near-zero error rate. LUCARIO fills a relevant gap and provides a practical and scalable testbed for advancing probabilistic reasoning over structured data.