Specifically customized for five major scientific fields, NASA and IBM cooperate to develop a large language model INDUS

INDUS, named after the southern constellation, is a comprehensive set of large-scale language models that supports five scientific fields. (Source: NASA)

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Large language models (LLM) trained on large amounts of data perform well on natural language understanding and generation tasks. Most popular LLMs are trained using general corpora such as Wikipedia, but distributional changes in vocabulary lead to poor performance in specific domains.

Inspired by this, NASA collaborated with IBM to develop INDUS, a comprehensive set of LLMs tailored for and used in the fields of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary science and astrophysics Train on curated scientific corpora from different data sources.

INDUS contains two types of models: encoder and sentence Transformer. The encoder converts natural language text into a numerical encoding that the LLM can process. The INDUS encoder is trained on a corpus of 60 billion tokens containing astrophysics, planetary science, earth science, heliophysics, biological and physical science data.

Related research titled "INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications" was published on the arXiv preprint platform.

Paper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10725

LLM trained on a general domain corpus performs well on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous studies have shown that LLMs trained using domain-specific corpora perform better on specialized tasks.

For example, some researchers have developed LLMs in several specific fields, such as SCIBERT, BIOBERT, MATBERT, BATTERYBERT and SCHOLARBERT, with the purpose of improving the accuracy of NLP tasks in the field.

INDUS: A Comprehensive Set of LLMs

In this study, the researchers focused specifically on interdisciplinary areas such as physics, earth sciences, astrophysics, Solar physics, planetary science and biology.

Illustration: Overview of the INDUS model. (Source: Paper)

INDUS is a set of encoder-based LLMs focused on these areas of interest, trained with carefully curated corpora from diverse sources. More than half of the 50,000 words included in INDUS are unique to the specific scientific field used for training. The INDUS Encoder model fine-tunes the Sentence Transformer model on approximately 268 million text pairs, including title/summary and question/answer.

Specifically:

1. A custom tokenizer INDUSBPE was built from a curated scientific corpus using a byte pair encoding algorithm.

2. Pre-trained multiple encoder-only LLMs using selected scientific corpora and the INDUSBPE tagger. We further create a sentence embedding model by fine-tuning the encoder-only model with a contrastive learning objective to learn “universal” sentence embeddings. Smaller, more efficient versions of these models were trained using knowledge extraction techniques.

3. Created three new scientific benchmark datasets, CLIMATE-CHANGE NER (entity recognition task), NASA-QA (extraction question answering task) and NASA-IR (retrieval task) to further accelerate this multi-disciplinary field Research.

4. Through experimental results, we demonstrate the model’s excellent performance on these benchmark tasks as well as existing domain-specific benchmarks, surpassing general models such as RoBERTa and scientific domain encoders such as SCIBERT.

Perform better than non-domain-specific LLM

By providing INDUS with domain-specific vocabulary, the research team outperformed open, non-domain-specific LLM on biomedical task benchmarks, scientific question answering benchmarks, and earth science entity recognition tests better.

Compared the INDUS model with similarly sized open source models RoBERTaBASE, SCIBERT, MINILM and TINYBERT.

In the natural language understanding task, among the base models, INDUSBASE significantly outperforms the general RoBERTa model on micro/macro averages, while also achieving competitive performance in the biological domain-specific corresponding model SCIBERT.

Table: BLURB evaluation results. (Source: Paper)

BLURB significantly outperforms corresponding baseline models on the climate change NER task, demonstrating the effectiveness of training on large domain-specific data.

Table: Climate change NER benchmark results. (Source: paper)

In NASA-QA (extraction question answering task), fine-tuning the augmented training set using relevant SQuAD. All models were fine-tuned for 15 epochs, and it was observed that INDUSBASE outperformed all similarly sized models, while INDUSSMALL performed relatively strongly.

Table: NASA-QA benchmark results. (Source: Paper)

In retrieval tasks, the INDUS model is evaluated on the NASA-IR dataset and the BEIR benchmark, which consists of 12 retrieval tasks covering various domains.

As shown in the table below, both sentence embedding models perform significantly better than the baseline on the NASA-IR task, while still maintaining good performance on several BEIR tasks.

Table: NASA-IR and BEIR evaluation results. (Source: Paper)

The researchers also measured the average retrieval time for each of 4,202 test queries on the BEIR natural problem set on a single A100 GPU. This time includes the time to code the query, the corpus, and the time to retrieve relevant documents. Notably, INDUS-RETRIEVERSMALL outperforms INDUS-RETRIEVERBASE on both NASA-IR and BEIR, while being approximately 4.6 times faster.

IBM researcher Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee commented on the overall approach: "Not only do we have a custom vocabulary, but we also have a large professional corpus for training the encoder model and a good training strategy, which achieves excellent performance. For smaller , faster version, we use neural architecture search to obtain the model architecture and use knowledge distillation to train it while supervising the larger model."

Dr. Sylvain Costes, NASA Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division, discussed. Benefits of integrating INDUS: “Integrating INDUS with the Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) application programming interface (API) allows us to develop and pilot chatbots that provide more intuitive search capabilities for browsing individual datasets. We are currently exploring Methods to improve OSDR’s internal curatorial data system, using INDUS to increase the efficiency of the curatorial team and reduce the amount of manual work required every day.”

Reference content:https://techxplore.com/news/2024-06. -nasa-ibm-collaboration-indus-large.html

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