# STRuCT-LLM: Unifying Tabular and Graph Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Semantic Parsing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21575 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21575/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14333/) (2024)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [SQL-R1: Training Natural Language to SQL Reasoning Model By Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08600/) (2025)
- [On the Potential of Lexico-logical Alignments for Semantic Parsing to SQL Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11246/) (2020)
- [Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23157/) (2025)
- [Text-to-SQL in the Wild: A Naturally-Occurring Dataset Based on Stack Exchange Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05006/) (2021)
- [Text2Cypher: Bridging Natural Language and Graph Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10064/) (2024)
- [Solid-SQL: Enhanced Schema-linking based In-context Learning for Robust Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12522/) (2024)
- [The Mighty ToRR: A Benchmark for Table Reasoning and Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19412/) (2025)
- [Sparks of Tabular Reasoning via Text2SQL Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00016/) (2025)
- [CR-LT-KGQA: A Knowledge Graph Question Answering Dataset Requiring Commonsense Reasoning and Long-Tail Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01395/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Text2Cypher with Schema Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05118/) (2025)
- [Query, Don't Train: Privacy-Preserving Tabular Prediction from EHR Data via SQL Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21801/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Models for Data Visualization Utilizing nvBench Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00832/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Gap: Enabling Natural Language Queries for NoSQL Databases through Text-to-NoSQL Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11201/) (2025)
- [Text2Cypher: Data Pruning using Hard Example Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05122/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Towards Agents That Know When They Don't Know: Uncertainty as a Control Signal for Structured Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02401/) (2025)
- [Ambig-DS: A Benchmark for Task-Framing Ambiguity in Data-Science Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09698/) (2026)
- [Towards Label-Free Biological Reasoning Synthetic Dataset Creation via Uncertainty Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05871/) (2025)
- [Object Aligner: A Configurable JSON Schema Similarity Score for Graphs, Applied to LLM Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01972/) (2026)
- [CypherTurn: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Conversational Text-to-Cypher Evaluation and the Autonomy Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36987/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose STRuCT-LLM, a unified framework for training large language models (LLMs) to perform structured reasoning over both relational and graph-structured data. Our approach jointly optimizes Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. To support fine-grained optimization in graph-based parsing, we introduce a topology-aware reward function based on graph edit distance. Unlike prior work that treats relational and graph formalisms in isolation, STRuCT-LLM leverages shared abstractions between SQL and Cypher to induce cross-formalism transfer, enabling SQL training to improve Cypher performance and vice versa - even without shared schemas. Our largest model (QwQ-32B) achieves substantial relative improvements across tasks: on semantic parsing, Spider improves by 13.5% and Text2Cypher by 73.1%. The model also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving performance on downstream tabular QA (TableBench: 8.5%) and knowledge graph QA (CR-LT-KGQA: 1.7%) without any QA-specific supervision. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of executable queries as scaffolds for structured reasoning and the synergistic benefits of jointly training on SQL and Cypher (code available at https://github.com/bouv/STRuCT-LLM).