China releases first lunar science multimodal large language model

(ECNS) -- China's Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, released world's first "Lunar science multimodal large language model" on Thursday.

The model integrates visual, multimodal, and natural language processing capabilities from the Tongyi series, employing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology for fine-tuning and training on Alibaba Cloud's BaiLian exclusive edition.

"With rapid development of deep space explorations, the volume of the detection data has increased rapidly. Scientific big data has become a powerful engine to promote scientific and technological innovation, said Ouyang Ziyuan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and first chief scientist of China's lunar exploration project.

Liu Zhongjun, a researcher from the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences explained that lunar crater identification is the prime application scenario, crucial for studying lunar geological evolution.

The characteristics of craters, such as size, depth, and shape, are key to understanding lunar geological history, Liu said.

Today, the accuracy of determining the age and morphology of lunar craters by the large model has achieved over 80 percent.

Human research on the geological evolution of the Moon mainly relies on remote sensing data to study lunar geological features.

Currently, there are over 1 million lunar craters with a diameter of more than one kilometer, and the number of smaller craters remains undetermined.

"Relying solely on manual identification is impractical", Liu added. The application of the Lunar Large Model significantly boosts research efficiency by inputting crater images and related questions, and the large model can determine the corresponding modality type from multimodal data.

In the future, the model will be integrated into the "Digital Lunar Cloud Platform "to perform platform's intelligent upgrade, according to Liu

Led by the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, this platform is the most comprehensive cloud platform for lunar exploration data, and will join with some major scientific facilities like FAST, becoming a vital component of research infrastructure, and accelerating innovation in lunar and planetary science research in China.