Large language models (LLMs) in the direction of task adaptation and capability enhancement for professional fields demonstrate significant application potential. Nevertheless, for complex physical systems such as combustion science, general-purpose LLMs often generate severe hallucinations due to insufficient domain knowledge and the inability to adhere to physical conservation laws. To address this issue, we propose the first full-stack domain-enhanced LLM workflow tailored for the field of combustion science, which integrates automated domain corpus construction, incremental pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and verifiable reward-based reinforcement learning. This workflow ensures that the model truly internalizes physical laws rather than merely learning textual statistical patterns. We also release FlameBench, a standardized evaluation benchmark specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks in combustion science. Experimental results demonstrate that the model developed in this work significantly outperforms state-of-the-art general-purpose closed-source models and traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods on combustion science reasoning tasks. This work lays a solid technical and resource foundation for the subsequent development of domain-specific scientific research agents with reliable scientific reasoning capabilities.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Dataset token distribution by category.
Figure 2: Data processing pipeline for the combustion-specific pre-training corpus.
Figure 3: The construction pipeline of FlameBench.
Figure 4: Architecture of the Closed-loop RAG Assessment System.
Figure 5: Loss and learning rate curves during the Continue Pre-training and SFT stages.
Model Group
Accuracy (%)
Qwen3-8B-Base
26.8
CPT
33.3
SFT-General
33.5
SFT-Combustion
35.1
RLVR-Opt
43.8
Table 1: Performance Comparison of Multi-stage Training
Model
Accuracy (%)
GPT-5
15.60
GLM-4
32.64
Gemini Pro
32.10
DeepSeek-R1
28.37
Average Score
27.18
Table 2: Performance Comparison of Different Models
Method
Accuracy (%)
RAG + GPT-5
16.52
RAG + GLM-4
32.09
RAG + Gemini Pro
27.80
RAG + DeepSeek-R1
28.54
Average Score
26.24
Table 3: Performance of RAG with Different Models
Figure 6: Comparison of training metrics between SFT-Combustion RL and Qwen-8B RL.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Hyperparameter
CPT
SFT-General
SFT-Combustion
Learning Rate
2.0e-5
5.0e-5
2.0e-5
LR Scheduler
WSD
Cosine
Cosine
Max Length
16,384
16,384
20,000
Batch Size (Total)
256
256
128
Precision
bf16
bf16
bf16
Warmup Ratio
0.01
0.05
0.03
Appendix
Table 4: Hyperparameters for CPT and SFT Stages.
Parameter
Value
Algorithm
GRPO
Actor Learning Rate
2.0×10−6
Global Training Batch Size
128
Max Prompt Length
1,024
Max Response Length
8,192
KL Coefficient ( β )
0.005
Appendix
Table 5: Hyperparameters for the GRPO reinforcement learning stage.
To advance foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) for combustion science, this study presents the first end-to-end framework for developing domain-specialized models for the combustion community. The framework comprises an AI-ready multimodal knowledge base at the 3.5 billion-token scale, extracted from over 200,000 peer-reviewed articles, 8,000 theses and dissertations, and approximately 400,000 lines of combustion CFD code; a rigorous and largely automated evaluation benchmark (CombustionQA, 436 questions across eight subfields); and a three-stage knowledge-injection pathway that progresses from lightweight retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to knowledge-graph-enhanced retrieval and continued pretraining. We first quantitatively validate Stage 1 (naive RAG) and find a hard ceiling: standard RAG accuracy peaks at 60%, far surpassing zero-shot performance (23%) yet well below the theoretical upper bound (87%). We further demonstrate that this stage's performance is severely constrained by context contamination. Consequently, building a domain foundation model requires structured knowledge graphs and continued pretraining (Stages 2 and 3).
Zonglin Yang, Runze Mao, Tianhao Wu +3
School of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, PRChina · AI for Science Institute, Beijing, 100080, China
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, and co-evolving paradigms have shown promising results in domains with verifiable reward signals, such as code and math. However, in unverifiable domains, such as scientific reasoning, these methods remain fragile due to unreliable solution evaluation and limited diversity in verification strategies. In this work, we propose Sci-CoE, a two-stage co-evolving framework for domains without verifiable feedback. The framework enables models to self-evolve as both solvers and verifiers by transitioning from sparse supervision to unsupervised learning. In the first stage, the model uses a small set of annotated data to establish fundamental correctness judgment anchors for the Verifier. In the second stage, we introduce a geometric reward mechanism that jointly considers consensus, reliability, and diversity, driving large-scale self-iteration on unlabeled data. Experiments on several general scientific benchmarks demonstrate that Sci-CoE enhances complex reasoning capabilities and exhibits strong scalability, facilitating the construction of more robust and diverse evaluation systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/InternScience/Sci-CoE.
Xiaohan He, Shiyang Feng, Songtao Huang +3
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Fudan University
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional logical reasoning capabilities but frequently struggle with the continuous spatiotemporal dynamics governed by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), often resulting in non-physical hallucinations. Existing approaches typically resort to costly, domain-specific fine-tuning, which severely limits cross-domain generalization and interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose OMNIFLOW, a neuro-symbolic architecture designed to ground frozen multimodal LLMs in fundamental physical laws without requiring domain-specific parameter updates. OMNIFLOW introduces a novel Semantic-Symbolic Alignment mechanism that projects high-dimensional flow tensors into topological linguistic descriptors, enabling the model to perceive physical structures rather than raw pixel values. Furthermore, we construct a Physics-Guided Chain-of-Thought (PG-CoT) workflow that orchestrates reasoning through dynamic constraint injection (e.g., mass conservation) and iterative reflexive verification. We evaluate OMNIFLOW on a comprehensive benchmark spanning microscopic turbulence, theoretical Navier-Stokes equations, and macroscopic global weather forecasting. Empirical results demonstrate that OMNIFLOW significantly outperforms traditional deep learning baselines in zero-shot generalization and few-shot adaptation tasks. Crucially, it offers transparent, physically consistent reasoning reports, marking a paradigm shift from black-box fitting to interpretable scientific reasoning.
Hao Wu, Yongheng Zhang, Yuan Gao +7
Tsinghua University · Tencent · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute +2