2 ms·

Isn't the best performing (markdown tables) and the worst (pipe delimited tables) basically the same format?

• simonw 1y ago
  The best performing isn't markdown tables, it's markdown key/value pairs: ## Record 1 ``` id: 1 name: Charlie A0 age: 56 city: New York department: Operations salary: 67896 years_experience: 7 project_count: 1 ``` Which makes sense to me because the problem with formats like CSV and regular markdown tables is that it is too easy for the model to mistakenly associate a value in a row with the wrong header. Explicit key/value formats like this or YAML or JSON objects make that a lot less likely.
  • cwmoore 1y ago
    I was surprised that XML (56%), with closing tags, wasn’t as good as YAMl/KV(60%), though line breaks perform the same kind of grouping function. Then I realized from the table that XML used about 50% more tokens (~75K vs ~50K) for similar accuracy, and for the first time felt a kind of sympathy for the LLM…
  • svachalek 1y ago
    Yeah that was my intuition as well. I think the KV-Markdown format gains additional advantage over JSON and YAML in the special syntax for headers helping to break up records.