arXiv AI
Sep 2

EGT-KG: Evidence-Grounded Typed KG Retrieval for Practical Scientific QA with Small Language Models

The paper introduces EGT-KG, an evidence‑grounded typed knowledge graph retrieval framework designed to enhance scientific question answering with small language models (SLMs). It compares three QA settings—standard Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and two EGT‑KG variants (automatically generated and expert‑defined relation schemas)—using a six‑dimensional evaluation on a biopolymer‑bound soil composite literature benchmark. Results show that both EGT‑KG variants outperform vanilla RAG, with the llama3:8b model achieving a final score of 70.37 (+14.67%) and 68.82 (+12.14%) for the AS and ES variants, respectively.

By Muran Yu, Jiechao Gao, Yuandong Pan, Barney H. Miao, Andrew C. Lesh, Kincho H. Law, Jie Wang, Michael D. Lepech
arXiv AI
2d ago

Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models

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