  Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of large language models
(LLMs) in various domains. To better serve the large number of Chinese users,
many commercial vendors in China have adopted localization strategies, training
and providing local LLMs specifically customized for Chinese users.
Furthermore, looking ahead, one of the key future applications of LLMs will be
practical deployment in industrial production by enterprises and users in those
sectors. However, the accuracy and robustness of LLMs in industrial scenarios
have not been well studied. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical
study on the accuracy and robustness of LLMs in the context of the Chinese
industrial production area. We manually collected 1,200 domain-specific
problems from 8 different industrial sectors to evaluate LLM accuracy.
Furthermore, we designed a metamorphic testing framework containing four
industrial-specific stability categories with eight abilities, totaling 13,631
questions with variants to evaluate LLM robustness. In total, we evaluated 9
different LLMs developed by Chinese vendors, as well as four different LLMs
developed by global vendors. Our major findings include: (1) Current LLMs
exhibit low accuracy in Chinese industrial contexts, with all LLMs scoring less
than 0.6. (2) The robustness scores vary across industrial sectors, and local
LLMs overall perform worse than global ones. (3) LLM robustness differs
significantly across abilities. Global LLMs are more robust under
logical-related variants, while advanced local LLMs perform better on problems
related to understanding Chinese industrial terminology. Our study results
provide valuable guidance for understanding and promoting the industrial domain
capabilities of LLMs from both development and industrial enterprise
perspectives. The results further motivate possible research directions and
tooling support.
