The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.
By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
arXiv:2606. 28446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Light curves describe temporal variations in the brightness of celestial objects.
By Yicheng Rui
arXiv:2606. 00384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fitting quantitative models to data is a central step in scientific workflows, yet it remains one of the least automated.
By William Rudman, Abhishek Divekar, Kanishk Jain, Sebastian Joseph, Stella S. R. Offner, Matthew Lease, Kyle Mahowald, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li
arXiv:2608. 13267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading).
By Paul Osemudiame Oamen, Owusu-Banahene Osei, Ananya Mukherjee, Christian Greisinger, Steffen Eger, Pius Onobhayedo, Wei Zhao
SciFigBench is a new benchmark for evaluating Vision Language Models on scientific method figure understanding. It focuses on three fine‑grained capabilities—dense content perception, visual relation comprehension, and information‑flow tracing—using 4,352 curated figures and 40,670 QA pairs. The authors also introduce SciFigCue, a training‑free visual prompting module that improves performance on several tasks without updating model parameters.
By Lijia Wu, Zheng Li, Yuxuan Liu, Jingwen Zhang, Penghai Zhao, Xiang Li
arXiv:2607. 00228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern time-domain surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) generate hundreds of thousands of alerts each night, making real-time decisions for follow-up observations a central challenge in time-domain astronomy.
By Ved G. Shah, Nabeel Rehemtulla, Adam A. Miller, Sushant Sharma Chaudhary, Michael W. Coughlin, Antoine Le Calloch, Matthew J. Graham, Joahan Castaneda Jaimes, Theophile Jegou du Laz, Ashish A. Mahabal, Frank J. Masci, Josiah Purdum, Reed Riddle, Jesper Sollerman, Anastasia Wei, Mansi M. Kasliwal