Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models for Tabular Data Generation—in One Day

Tabular instruction tuning has emerged as a promising research direction for improving LLMs’ understanding of tabular data. However,the majority of existing works only consider question answering and reasoning tasks over tabular data, leaving tabular data generation largely unnoticed. In this work, for the first time, we explore the efficacy of instruction tuning in improving LLMs’ tabular data generation capabilities. More specifically, given the high data and computation requirements of tabular instruction tuning, we aimto address the possibility of instruction tuning for tabular data generation with limited data and computational resources. To achieve this, we first create a high-quality instruction dataset for tabular data, enabling efficient LLM comprehension. We then instruction-tune an open-source LLM (LLaMA3.1-8B-instruct) on the training set of this dataset to improve its tabular data generation performance. Our experimental results show that by using our high-quality dataset and instruction-tuning on only 7K instructions with an A100 GPU, for less than 6 hours, we achieve tabular data generation performance on par with the most capable commercial LLM, GPT-4o.