# SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 86 of its 122 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 86)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09583/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08491/) (2023)
- [Fact or Fiction: Verifying Scientific Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14974/) (2020)
- [MAmmoTH: Building Math Generalist Models through Hybrid Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05653/) (2023)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [BioMistral: A Collection of Open-Source Pretrained Large Language Models for Medical Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10373/) (2024)
- [Transfer Learning in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: An Evaluation of BERT and ELMo on Ten Benchmarking Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05474/) (2019)
- [MedAlpaca -- An Open-Source Collection of Medical Conversational AI Models and Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08247/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16416/) (2025)
- [ChemAgent: Self-updating Library in Large Language Models Improves Chemical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06590/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01807/) (2025)
- [MicroVQA: A Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark for Microscopy-Based Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13399/) (2025)
- [SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15545/) (2024)
- [SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17952/) (2024)
- [Sequential Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24007/) (2025)
- [Sparse Logit Sampling: Accelerating Knowledge Distillation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16870/) (2025)
- [The Good, the Bad and the Constructive: Automatically Measuring Peer Review's Utility for Authors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04484/) (2025)
- [Efficient Data Selection at Scale via Influence Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19051/) (2025)
- [LazyReview A Dataset for Uncovering Lazy Thinking in NLP Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11042/) (2025)
- [AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13300/) (2025)
- [Prescriptive Scaling Laws for Data Constrained Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01640/) (2026)
- [From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01424/) (2025)
- [Merge to Learn: Efficiently Adding Skills to Language Models with Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12937/) (2024)
- [WildSci: Advancing Scientific Reasoning from In-the-Wild Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05567/) (2026)
- [MoCo: A One-Stop Shop for Model Collaboration Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21257/) (2026)
- [7B Fully Open Source Moxin-LLM/VLM -- From Pretraining to GRPO-based Reinforcement Learning Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06845/) (2024)
- [Demystifying Scientific Problem-Solving in LLMs by Probing Knowledge and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19202/) (2025)
- [Idea2Plan: Exploring AI-Powered Research Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24891/) (2025)
- [Improving Large Language Models with Concept-Aware Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07833/) (2025)
- [Doc2SAR: A Synergistic Framework for High-Fidelity Extraction of Structure-Activity Relationships from Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21625/) (2025)
- [TaxoAlign: Scholarly Taxonomy Generation Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17263/) (2025)
- [The Single-Multi Evolution Loop for Self-Improving Model Collaboration Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05182/) (2026)
- [SciMDR: Advancing Scientific Multimodal Document Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12249/) (2026)
- [Scaling Participation in Modular AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07812/) (2026)
- [The PLLuM Instruction Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17161/) (2025)
- [ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16073/) (2026)
- [Do We Need Bigger Models for Science? Task-Aware Retrieval with Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following instances for training and evaluation, covering 54 tasks. These tasks span five core scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF is unique in being entirely expert-written, high-quality instruction-following dataset for extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across diverse scientific fields. It features complex instructions with long input contexts, detailed task descriptions, and structured outputs. To demonstrate its utility, we finetune a series of large language models (LLMs) using a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF instructions. On nine out-of-distribution held-out tasks (referred to as SciRIFF-Eval), LLMs finetuned on SciRIFF achieve 70.6% average improvement over baselines trained only on general-domain instructions. SciRIFF facilitates the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the rapidly growing body of scientific literature.