GeoGalactica: A Scientific Large Language Model in Geoscience
Authors: name: Zhouhan Lin, name: Cheng Deng, name: Le Zhou, name: Tianhang Zhang, name: Yi Xu, name: Yutong Xu, name: Zhongmou He, name: Yuanyuan Shi, name: Beiya Dai, name: Yunchong Song, name: Boyi Zeng, name: Qiyuan Chen, name: Tao Shi, name: Tianyu Huang, name: Yiwei Xu, name: Shu Wang, name: Luoyi Fu, name: Weinan Zhang, name: Junxian He, name: Chao Ma, name: Yunqiang Zhu, name: Xinbing Wang, name: Chenghu Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success for their general
knowledge and ability to solve a wide spectrum of tasks in natural language
processing (NLP). Due to their impressive abilities, LLMs have shed light on
potential inter-discipline applications to foster scientific discoveries of a
specific domain by using artificial intelligence (AI for science, AI4S). In the
meantime, utilizing NLP techniques in geoscience research and practice is wide
and convoluted, contributing from knowledge extraction and document
classification to question answering and knowledge discovery. In this work, we
take the initial step to leverage LLM for science, through a rather
straightforward approach. We try to specialize an LLM into geoscience, by
further pre-training the model with a vast amount of texts in geoscience, as
well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) the resulting model with our custom
collected instruction tuning dataset. These efforts result in a model
GeoGalactica consisting of 30 billion parameters. To our best knowledge, it is
the largest language model for the geoscience domain. More specifically,
GeoGalactica is from further pre-training of Galactica. We train GeoGalactica
over a geoscience-related text corpus containing 65 billion tokens curated from
extensive data sources in the big science project Deep-time Digital Earth
(DDE), preserving as the largest geoscience-specific text corpus. Then we
fine-tune the model with 1 million pairs of instruction-tuning data consisting
of questions that demand professional geoscience knowledge to answer. In this
technical report, we will illustrate in detail all aspects of GeoGalactica,
including data collection, data cleaning, base model selection, pre-training,
SFT, and evaluation. We open-source our data curation tools and the checkpoints
of GeoGalactica during the first 3/4 of pre-training.