Abstract
Traditional tabular data synthesis methods often overlook the cross-modal heterogeneity of real-world tables, where structured continuous and discrete attributes coexist with unstructured long-text columns. Existing synthesis approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve accurate statistical fidelity for non-textual attributes and consistent semantic constraints between textual and non-textual attributes. In this work, we establish the first benchmark for long-text tabular data synthesis and introduce a novel metric, termed Textual Column Correlation Fidelity (TCCF), to quantify cross-modal semantic alignment. We propose AFT-Tab, an adversarial fine-tuning framework that synergistically trains an LLM-based text generator and a deep-learning-based non-textual generator. Through a dual-feedback mechanism guided by an LLM discriminator, AFT-Tab ensures both precise statistical distributions and rigorous semantic constraints. Experimental results show that AFT-Tab significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in statistical fidelity, TCCF, diversity, and downstream task utility.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.209
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4581–4594
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.209/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yuhao Zhang, Liang Yan, Shaoming Duan, Xinyu Zha, Jinhang Su, Peiyi Han, and Chuanyi Liu. 2026. AFT-Tab: Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Tabular Data Synthesis with Long Text Columns. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4581–4594, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AFT-Tab: Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Tabular Data Synthesis with Long Text Columns (Zhang et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.209.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.209.checklist.pdf
























