AstroMLab

AstroMLab is a diverse group of researchers dedicated to advancing the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in astronomy. Our team includes:

• Leading astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists.
• Natural language processing experts.
• Frontier arXivists from the NASA Astrophysics Data System

Objectives

• Develop specialized LLMs for astronomy
• Create open-source models for advanced research
• Facilitate LLM-driven end-to-end agentic research in astronomy

Current Work

Our ongoing projects include:

• Curation of an astronomy-based benchmarking dataset
• Development of specialized astronomy LLMs
• Performance evaluation of models on astronomical tasks

Models and Performance

We have developed several models, including AstroSage-8B, AstroLLaMA-2-70B, and AstroLLaMA-3-8B. Our AstroSage-8B model has demonstrated strong performance in astronomy Q&A tasks (Ting et al. 2024, Pan et al. 2024):

AstroSage-8B, our lightweight model, currently achieves the highest score among the ~7B parameter models in its astronomy knowledge recall ability.

Support and Resources

Our research benefits from:

• Access to the Frontier nodes at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
• Support from Microsoft's Accelerating Foundation Models Research (AFMR) program

Contact

For inquiries or collaboration opportunities, please contact: astromachinelearninglab@gmail.com