Table-BiEval: A Self-Supervised, Dual-Track Framework for Decoupling Structure and Content in LLM Evaluation

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the capability to faithfully translate natural language into rigorous structured formats-essential for tool invocation-and to convert complex tabular information into machine-readable specifications has become paramount. However, current evaluations lack effective methodologies to measure this structural fidelity without costly human intervention, as traditional text metrics fail to detect semantic drift in code-like outputs. This paper proposes Table-BiEval, a novel approach based on a human-free, self-supervised evaluation framework, to assess LLMs performance quantitatively. By leveraging deterministic Intermediate Representations, our framework calculates Content Semantic Accuracy and Normalized Tree Edit Distance to decouple structure from content. Also, it empirically evaluates 15 state-of-the-art LLMs across dual topological dimensions-hierarchical structures and flat tables. The results reveal substantial variability, highlighting that mid-sized models can surprisingly outperform larger counterparts in structural efficiency and confirming that deep recursive nesting remains a universal bottleneck for current architectures.