We explore the potential of enhancing LLM performance in astronomy-focused question-answering through targeted, continual pre-training. By employing a compact 7B-parameter LLaMA-2 model and focusing exclusively on a curated set of astronomy corpora—comprising abstracts, introductions, and conclusions—we achieve notable improvements in specialized topic comprehension. While general LLMs like GPT-4 excel in broader question-answering scenarios due to superior reasoning capabilities, our findings suggest that continual pre-training with limited resources can still enhance model performance on specialized topics. Additionally, we present an extension of AstroLLaMA: the fine-tuning of the 7B LLaMA model on a domain-specific conversational data set, culminating in the release of the chat-enabled AstroLLaMA for community use. Comprehensive quantitative benchmarking is currently in progress and will be detailed in an upcoming full paper. The model, AstroLLaMA-Chat, is now available at https://***/universeTBD, providing the first open-source conversational AI tool tailored for the astronomy community.

During April 7–21 2020, KAGRA conducted its first scientific observation in conjunction with the GEO600 detector. The dominant noise sources during this run were found to be suspension control noise in the low-frequency range and acoustic noise in the mid-frequency range. In this study, we show that their contributions in the observational data can be reduced by a signal processing method called independent component analysis (ICA). The model of ICA is extended from that studied in the initial KAGRA data analysis to account for frequency dependence, while the linearity and stationarity of the coupling between the interferometer and the noise sources are still assumed. We identify optimal witness sensors in the application of ICA, leading to successful mitigation of these two dominant contributions. We also analyze the stability of the transfer functions for the entire two weeks of data to investigate the applicability of the proposed subtraction method in gravitational wave searches.