SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding
Authors: name: Sihang Li, name: Jin Huang, name: Jiaxi Zhuang, name: Yaorui Shi, name: Xiaochen Cai, name: Mingjun Xu, name: Xiang Wang, name: Linfeng Zhang, name: Guolin Ke, name: Hengxing Cai

Scientific literature understanding is crucial for extracting targeted
information and garnering insights, thereby significantly advancing scientific
discovery. Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they
face challenges in scientific literature understanding, primarily due to (1) a
lack of scientific knowledge and (2) unfamiliarity with specialized scientific
tasks.
  To develop an LLM specialized in scientific literature understanding, we
propose a hybrid strategy that integrates continual pre-training (CPT) and
supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to simultaneously infuse scientific domain
knowledge and enhance instruction-following capabilities for domain-specific
tasks.cIn this process, we identify two key challenges: (1) constructing
high-quality CPT corpora, and (2) generating diverse SFT instructions. We
address these challenges through a meticulous pipeline, including PDF text
extraction, parsing content error correction, quality filtering, and synthetic
instruction creation. Applying this strategy, we present a suite of LLMs:
SciLitLLM, specialized in scientific literature understanding. These models
demonstrate promising performance on scientific literature understanding
benchmarks.
  Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present an effective framework that
integrates CPT and SFT to adapt LLMs to scientific literature understanding,
which can also be easily adapted to other domains. (2) We propose an LLM-based
synthesis method to generate diverse and high-quality scientific instructions,
resulting in a new instruction set -- SciLitIns -- for supervised fine-tuning
in less-represented scientific domains. (3) SciLitLLM achieves promising
performance improvements on scientific literature understanding benchmarks.