# Jellyfish: A Large Language Model for Data Preprocessing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01678 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01678/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 117 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Entity Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08185/) (2024)
- [Matchmaker: Self-Improving Large Language Model Programs for Schema Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24105/) (2024)
- [Can LLMs Clean Up Your Mess? A Survey of Application-Ready Data Preparation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17058/) (2026)
- [Table-LLM-Specialist: Language Model Specialists for Tables using Iterative Generator-Validator Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12164/) (2024)
- [KcMF: A Knowledge-compliant Framework for Schema and Entity Matching with Fine-tuning-free LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12480/) (2024)
- [In-context Learning of Evolving Data Streams with Tabular Foundational Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16840/) (2025)
- [CoddLLM: Empowering Large Language Models for Data Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00329/) (2025)
- [AnyMatch -- Efficient Zero-Shot Entity Matching with a Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04073/) (2024)
- [Had enough of experts? Quantitative knowledge retrieval from large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07770/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Network Approach to Semantic Type Detection in Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00123/) (2024)
- [Data-Prep-Kit: getting your data ready for LLM application development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18164/) (2024)
- [VickreyFeedback: Cost-efficient Data Construction for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18417/) (2024)
- [Ensembling LLM-Induced Decision Trees for Explainable and Robust Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07246/) (2025)
- [An Automatic Prompt Generation System for Tabular Data Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05618/) (2024)
- [Linking Cryptoasset Attribution Tags to Knowledge Graph Entities: An LLM-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10453/) (2025)
- [Ostrakon-VL: Towards Domain-Expert MLLM for Food-Service and Retail Stores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21342/) (2026)
- [When Helping Hurts and How to Fix It: Multi-Agent Debate for Data Cleaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02866/) (2026)
- [CITBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Interactive Tabular Data Processing with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00018/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores the utilization of LLMs for data preprocessing (DP), a crucial step in the data mining pipeline that transforms raw data into a clean format conducive to easy processing. Whereas the use of LLMs has sparked interest in devising universal solutions to DP, recent initiatives in this domain typically rely on GPT APIs, raising inevitable data breach concerns. Unlike these approaches, we consider instruction-tuning local LLMs (7 -- 13B models) as universal DP task solvers that operate on a local, single, and low-priced GPU, ensuring data security and enabling further customization. We select a collection of datasets across four representative DP tasks and construct instruction tuning data using data configuration, knowledge injection, and reasoning data distillation techniques tailored to DP. By tuning Mistral-7B, Llama 3-8B, and OpenOrca-Platypus2-13B, our models, namely, Jellyfish-7B/8B/13B, deliver competitiveness compared to GPT-3.5/4 models and strong generalizability to unseen tasks while barely compromising the base models' abilities in NLP tasks. Meanwhile, Jellyfish offers enhanced reasoning capabilities compared to GPT-3.5. Our models are available at: https://huggingface.co/NECOUDBFM/Jellyfish . Our instruction dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/NECOUDBFM/Jellyfish-Instruct .