StructLM: Towards Building Generalist Models for Structured Knowledge
  Grounding
Authors: name: Alex Zhuang, name: Ge Zhang, name: Tianyu Zheng, name: Xinrun Du, name: Junjie Wang, name: Weiming Ren, name: Stephen W. Huang, name: Jie Fu, name: Xiang Yue, name: Wenhu Chen

Structured data sources, such as tables, graphs, and databases, are
ubiquitous knowledge sources. Despite the demonstrated capabilities of large
language models (LLMs) on plain text, their proficiency in interpreting and
utilizing structured data remains limited. Our investigation reveals a notable
deficiency in LLMs' ability to process structured data, e.g., ChatGPT lags
behind state-of-the-art (SoTA) model by an average of 35%. To augment the
Structured Knowledge Grounding (SKG) capabilities in LLMs, we have developed a
comprehensive instruction tuning dataset comprising 1.1 million examples.
Utilizing this dataset, we train a series of models, referred to as StructLM,
based on the Code-LLaMA architecture, ranging from 7B to 34B parameters. Our
StructLM series surpasses task-specific models on 14 out of 18 evaluated
datasets and establishes new SoTA achievements on 7 SKG tasks. Furthermore,
StructLM demonstrates exceptional generalization across 6 novel SKG tasks.
Contrary to expectations, we observe that scaling model size offers marginal
benefits, with StructLM-34B showing only slight improvements over StructLM-7B.
This suggests that structured knowledge grounding is still a challenging task
and requires more innovative design to push to a new level.