SolarGPT-QA: A Domain-Adaptive Large Language Model for Educational Question Answering in Space Weather and Heliophysics
This work addresses the need for effective educational tools in space science, which is crucial for early warning and forecasting of solar events that impact critical infrastructure, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models and methods.
The authors tackled the problem of large language models lacking domain-specific knowledge and pedagogical capability for space science education by introducing SolarGPT-QA, a domain-adapted model that achieves competitive performance in educational question answering for space weather and heliophysics.
Solar activity, including solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and geomagnetic storms can significantly impact satellites, aviation, power grids, data centers, and space missions. Extreme solar events can cause substantial economic damage with limited advance warning, underscoring the importance of early warning systems, accurate forecasting, and effective education in space science. Although large language models (LLMs) perform well on general tasks, they often lack domain specific knowledge and pedagogical capability to clearly explain complex space science concepts. We introduce SolarGPT-QA, a question answering system based on a domain adapted large language model built on the LLaMA-3 base model. The model is trained using scientific literature and large scale question and answer data generated with GPT-4 and refined using Grok-3 in a student friendly storytelling style. To evaluate response quality, we employ an LLM-as-judge evaluation framework, where a strong reference model assesses generated answers using structured criteria including scientific accuracy, clarity, completeness, and pedagogical effectiveness. Results show that SolarGPT-QA performs strongly relative to general purpose models in zero shot settings and achieves competitive performance compared to instruction tuned models for educational explanations in space weather and heliophysics. Ablation studies indicate that combining domain adaptive pretraining with fine tuning is important for balancing scientific accuracy and educational effectiveness.