Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models
Domain-specialized language models are widely used for scientific question answering, but stronger general-purpose systems raise a sharper question: when does domain-specific fine-tuning remain valuable for open-ended scientific reasoning? We study this in astronomy with a curated QA benchmark from publicly available 2017--2026 Olympiad-style materials. The free-response subset contains 300 questions, including 204 text-only and 96 image-linked examples. We compare open-weight and API-served general-purpose, multimodal, and astronomy-specialized models using judge-based correctness and complementary reference metrics. Strong general-purpose models establish the highest correctness baselin...
| Authors | Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | astro-ph.IM |
| Published | 15 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 September 2026 |
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