INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications
This work addresses the need for more effective and efficient language models in scientific applications, though it is incremental as it builds on prior domain-focused training approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of improving language model performance on scientific tasks by developing INDUS, a suite of models tailored for Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences, and astrophysics, which outperformed general-purpose and domain-specific encoders on new and existing benchmarks.
Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the closely-related domains of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics, and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address NLP tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning based text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation for applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets, CLIMATE-CHANGE NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. We show that our models outperform both general-purpose (RoBERTa) and domain-specific (SCIBERT) encoders on these new tasks as well as existing tasks in the domains of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of these models in two industrial settings -- as a retrieval model for large-scale vector search applications and in automatic content tagging systems.