AstroMLab

AstroMLab is a diverse group of researchers dedicated to advancing the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in astronomy. Our team includes:

• Leading astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists.
• Natural language processing experts.
• Frontier arXivists from the NASA Astrophysics Data System

Objectives

• Develop specialized LLMs for astronomy
• Create open-source models for advanced research
• Facilitate LLM-driven end-to-end agentic research in astronomy

Current Work

Our ongoing projects include:

• Curation of an astronomy-based benchmarking dataset
• Development of specialized astronomy LLMs
• Performance evaluation of models on astronomical tasks

Models and Performance

We have developed several models, including AstroSage-LLaMA-3.1-70B (de Haan et al. 2025b) AstroSage-LLaMA-3.1-8B (de Haan et al. 2025a), AstroLLaMA-2-70B (Pan et al. 2024), and AstroLLaMA-3-8B (Pan et al. 2024). Our AstroSage-LLaMA-3.1-8B model has demonstrated strong performance in astronomy Q&A tasks (Ting et al. 2024):

As of this writing in May 2025, AstroSage-LLaMA-3.1-70B (de Haan et al. 2025b) achieves among the highest scores on AstroBench (Ting et al. 2024), tying with Claude-4-Opus and outperforming other leading models including GPT-4.1, o3, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Claude-4-Sonnet.

Support and Resources

Our research benefits from:

• Access to the Frontier nodes at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
• Support from Microsoft's Accelerating Foundation Models Research (AFMR) program

Contact

For inquiries or collaboration opportunities, please contact: [email protected]