# StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/

## Key facts

- Cited by 343 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 47 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02164/) (2019)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12813/) (2023)
- [TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07653/) (2021)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02875/) (2022)
- [Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03126/) (2016)
- [Large Language Models are Versatile Decomposers: Decompose Evidence and Questions for Table-based Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13808/) (2023)
- [Variational Reasoning for Question Answering with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04071/) (2017)
- [Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00782/) (2018)
- [Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12773/) (2020)
- [A comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT's zero-shot Text-to-SQL capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13547/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06710/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 343)

- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08302/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08921/) (2024)
- [HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14831/) (2024)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03927/) (2024)
- [G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07630/) (2024)
- [Language is All a Graph Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07134/) (2023)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07521/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models on Graphs: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02783/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [AutoWebGLM: A Large Language Model-based Web Navigating Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03648/) (2024)
- [GNN-RAG: Graph Neural Retrieval for Large Language Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20139/) (2024)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)
- [AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04363/) (2024)
- [KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11163/) (2024)
- [Can Knowledge Graphs Reduce Hallucinations in LLMs? : A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07914/) (2023)
- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [Simple Is Effective: The Roles of Graphs and Large Language Models in Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20724/) (2024)
- [GRAG: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16506/) (2024)
- [Plan-on-Graph: Self-Correcting Adaptive Planning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23875/) (2024)
- [TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19318/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study how to improve the zero-shot reasoning ability of large language models~(LLMs) over structured data in a unified way. Inspired by the study on tool augmentation for LLMs, we develop an Iterative Reading-then-Reasoning~(IRR) approach for solving question answering tasks based on structured data, called StructGPT. In our approach, we construct the specialized function to collect relevant evidence from structured data (ie reading), and let LLMs concentrate the reasoning task based on the collected information (ie reasoning). Specially, we propose an invoking-linearization-generation procedure to support LLMs in reasoning on the structured data with the help of the external interfaces. By iterating this procedures with provided interfaces, our approach can gradually approach the target answer to a given query. Extensive experiments conducted on three types of structured data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can significantly boost the performance of ChatGPT and achieve comparable performance against the full-data supervised-tuning baselines. Our codes and data are publicly available at~urlhttps://github.com/RUCAIBox/StructGPT.