# TrustUQA: A Trustful Framework for Unified Structured Data Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/) (2015)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Chameleon or Stubborn Sloth: Revealing the Behavior of Large Language Models in Knowledge Conflicts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13300/) (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)
- [Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03126/) (2016)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [RESDSQL: Decoupling Schema Linking and Skeleton Parsing for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05965/) (2023)
- [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)
- [UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00959/) (2022)
- [Improving Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering by Learning Intermediate Supervision Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03737/) (2021)
- [Entities as Experts: Sparse Memory Access with Entity Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07202/) (2020)
- [Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01515/) (2021)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
- [Few-shot In-context Learning for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01750/) (2023)
- [TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08674/) (2023)
- [Memory Augmented Policy Optimization for Program Synthesis and Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02322/) (2018)
- [Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01707/) (2020)
- [FIRST: A Framework for Optimizing Information Quality in Mobile Crowdsensing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11147/) (2018)
- [Time-aware Multiway Adaptive Fusion Network for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12529/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Diagnosing and Addressing Pitfalls in KG-RAG Datasets: Toward More Reliable Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23495/) (2025)
- [FailureSensorIQ: A Multi-Choice QA Dataset for Understanding Sensor Relationships and Failure Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03278/) (2025)
- [Pandora: A Code-Driven Large Language Model Agent for Unified Reasoning Across Diverse Structured Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12734/) (2025)
- [Reasoning Factual Knowledge in Structured Data with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12188/) (2024)
- [Privacy-protected Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08785/) (2025)
- [Self-Correction Distillation for Structured Data Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07998/) (2025)
- [Pandora: Leveraging Code-driven Knowledge Transfer for Unified Structured Knowledge Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17905/) (2025)
- [CRAFTQA: A Code-Driven Adaptive Framework for Complex Structured Data Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02170/) (2026)
- [Improving Answer Extraction in Context-based Question Answering Systems Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06197/) (2026)
- [SQuaD-SQL: Efficient Text-to-SQL with Small Language Models via LLM-Guided Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08161/) (2026)
- [Evolving from Lessons: Skill-Augmented Table Graph Reasoning for Operation-wise Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22633/) (2026)
- [DynaContext: Self-Improving Dynamic Contextualization of Optimized Prompts for Heterogeneous Parameter Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language question answering (QA) over structured data sources such as tables and knowledge graphs have been widely investigated, especially with Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years. The main solutions include question to formal query parsing and retrieval-based answer generation. However, current methods of the former often suffer from weak generalization, failing to dealing with multi-types of sources, while the later is limited in trustfulness. In this paper, we propose TrustUQA, a trustful QA framework that can simultaneously support multiple types of structured data in a unified way. To this end, it adopts an LLM-friendly and unified knowledge representation method called Condition Graph(CG), and uses an LLM and demonstration-based two-level method for CG querying. For enhancement, it is also equipped with dynamic demonstration retrieval. We have evaluated TrustUQA with 5 benchmarks covering 3 types of structured data. It outperforms 2 existing unified structured data QA methods. In comparison with the baselines that are specific to one data type, it achieves state-of-the-art on 2 of the datasets. Further more, we have demonstrated the potential of our method for more general QA tasks, QA over mixed structured data and QA across structured data. The code is available at https://github.com/zjukg/TrustUQA.