MATRIX-PT is a parameter-efficient LoRA adapter released by Radical AI for Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B. It is designed to study post-training adaptations for materials science tasks, with a focus on theoretical reasoning, scientific problem solving, and multimodal reasoning over experimental images.

This model is released alongside the MATRIX benchmark (dataset link), which is used to evaluate reasoning across text- and image-based materials science tasks.

Model Details

Model Description

Developed by: Radical AI
Model type: LoRA adapter (PEFT) for a multimodal transformer
Base model: Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B
Language(s): English
License: Apache-2.0 (adapter); base model license applies to Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B
Finetuned from model: Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B

MATRIX-PT modifies the base model through lightweight post-training to better surface domain-relevant reasoning patterns in materials science. The adapter primarily affects inference-time behavior, improving the model's ability to reason about structured scientific concepts and experimental imagery without altering the underlying base weights.

Model Sources

Repository: https://huggingface.co/radical-ai/MATRIX-PT
Paper: MATRIX: A Multimodal Benchmark and Post-Training Framework for Materials Science
Benchmark: https://huggingface.co/datasets/radical-ai/MATRIX

Uses

Direct Use

MATRIX-PT is intended for:

Evaluating multimodal reasoning in materials science
Studying post-training effects on scientific reasoning behavior
Benchmarking model performance on theory-driven and experiment-driven tasks using MATRIX

The adapter can be loaded on top of Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B using PEFT without modifying the base model weights.

Downstream Use

The adapter may be used as a starting point for:

Further domain-specific fine-tuning
Diagnostic studies of reasoning behavior in scientific models
Comparative evaluation against other multimodal or domain-adapted models

Out-of-Scope Use

MATRIX-PT is not intended for:

General-purpose conversational use
High-stakes decision making (e.g., medical, legal, industrial control)
Deployment without human oversight in safety-critical settings

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

MATRIX-PT inherits limitations and biases from the base model, including potential hallucinations and incorrect reasoning.
The adapter is trained and evaluated on a focused materials science benchmark and may not generalize outside this domain.
Performance improvements are task- and prompt-dependent and should not be interpreted as broad scientific understanding.
As with most LLMs/VLMs, the model may produce plausible-sounding but incorrect explanations.

Recommendations

Users should:

Treat outputs as assistive rather than authoritative
Validate results against domain expertise or ground truth
Use MATRIX-PT primarily for evaluation, analysis, and research purposes

How to Get Started with the Model

Install

Tested versions:

bash

pip install torch>=2.0.0 torchvision>=0.15.0
pip install transformers>=4.56.0 peft>=0.17.0 accelerate>=1.10.0
pip install pillow>=10.0.0 qwen-vl-utils>=0.0.8

Or install all at once:

pip install torch>=2.0.0 torchvision>=0.15.0 transformers>=4.56.0 peft>=0.17.0 accelerate>=1.10.0 pillow>=10.0.0 qwen-vl-utils>=0.0.8

Load the Adapter

python

import torch
from transformers import AutoProcessor, Qwen2VLForConditionalGeneration
from peft import PeftModel

DEFAULT_EOS_TOKEN = "</s>"
DEFAULT_BOS_TOKEN = "<s>"
DEFAULT_UNK_TOKEN = "<unk>"

def align_tokenizer_and_model(tokenizer, model):
    """
    Ensure required special tokens exist and resize embeddings to match tokenizer vocab.
    This is necessary because the adapter was trained with this alignment.
    """
    special_tokens = {}
    if tokenizer.pad_token is None:
        tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token
    if tokenizer.eos_token is None:
        special_tokens["eos_token"] = DEFAULT_EOS_TOKEN
    if tokenizer.bos_token is None:
        special_tokens["bos_token"] = DEFAULT_BOS_TOKEN
    if tokenizer.unk_token is None:
        special_tokens["unk_token"] = DEFAULT_UNK_TOKEN

    num_new_tokens = tokenizer.add_special_tokens(special_tokens)
    if num_new_tokens > 0 or model.get_input_embeddings().weight.shape[0] != len(tokenizer):
        model.resize_token_embeddings(len(tokenizer))
        if num_new_tokens > 0:
            input_embeds = model.get_input_embeddings().weight.data
            output_embeds = model.get_output_embeddings().weight.data

            if tokenizer.unk_token_id is not None:
                input_init = input_embeds[tokenizer.unk_token_id].unsqueeze(0)
                output_init = output_embeds[tokenizer.unk_token_id].unsqueeze(0)
            else:
                input_init = input_embeds[:-num_new_tokens].mean(dim=0, keepdim=True)
                output_init = output_embeds[:-num_new_tokens].mean(dim=0, keepdim=True)

            input_embeds[-num_new_tokens:] = input_init
            output_embeds[-num_new_tokens:] = output_init

# Model IDs
base_model_id = "Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B"
adapter_id = "radical-ai/MATRIX-PT"

# Load processor from base model
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(base_model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
tokenizer = processor.tokenizer
tokenizer.padding_side = "left"
if tokenizer.pad_token_id is None:
    tokenizer.pad_token_id = tokenizer.eos_token_id

# Use Instruct processor for chat template (base model template has issues)
instruct_processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct",
    trust_remote_code=True
)
processor.chat_template = instruct_processor.chat_template
tokenizer.chat_template = instruct_processor.tokenizer.chat_template

# Load base model
model = Qwen2VLForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    base_model_id,
    device_map="auto",
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    trust_remote_code=True,
)

# IMPORTANT: Align tokenizer and model before loading adapter
align_tokenizer_and_model(tokenizer, model)

# Load adapter
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(model, adapter_id)
model.eval()

Run Inference

python

# Text-only inference
question = "What is a phase diagram?"
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": question}]

rendered = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
)
inputs = tokenizer([rendered], return_tensors="pt")
inputs = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in inputs.items()}

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model.generate(
        **inputs,
        max_new_tokens=256,
        do_sample=False,
        pad_token_id=tokenizer.pad_token_id
    )

# Decode only the new tokens
input_len = inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]
generated_ids = outputs[:, input_len:]
response = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids,
    skip_special_tokens=True,
    clean_up_tokenization_spaces=True,
)[0].strip()

print(response)

With Images

python

from PIL import Image

# Load image
image = Image.open("path/to/image.png").convert("RGB")

# Create message with image
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "Describe this experimental image."}
        ]
    }
]

# Process with image
prompt = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = processor(text=prompt, images=[image], return_tensors="pt")

# Convert pixel_values to bfloat16 if present
if "pixel_values" in inputs:
    inputs["pixel_values"] = inputs["pixel_values"].to(torch.bfloat16)

inputs = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in inputs.items()}

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model.generate(
        **inputs,
        max_new_tokens=256,
        do_sample=False,
    )

input_len = inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]
generated_ids = outputs[:, input_len:]
response = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids,
    skip_special_tokens=True,
    clean_up_tokenization_spaces=True,
)[0].strip()

print(response)

Training Details

Training Data

The adapter was trained using a curated materials science dataset emphasizing:

Foundational theory questions
Research-level reasoning
Hypothesis generation
Multimodal reasoning over experimental imagery

For evaluation details, see the MATRIX dataset card and accompanying paper.

Training Procedure

Method: LoRA (parameter-efficient fine-tuning)
LoRA rank (r): 8
LoRA alpha: 32
LoRA dropout: 0.05
Target modules: q_proj, k_proj, v_proj, o_proj, gate_proj, up_proj, down_proj
Objective: Improve accessibility of materials science-relevant reasoning patterns during inference
Training regime: Mixed precision (bf16)

Evaluation

Testing Data

MATRIX-PT is benchmarked on the MATRIX dataset, which consists of both textual and visual reasoning tasks in materials science. Evaluation compares the adapted model against the base Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B model under identical prompting and decoding settings.

Metrics

Task accuracy
Reasoning consistency across related prompts
Qualitative error analysis (see accompanying paper)

Results

Across MATRIX tasks, MATRIX-PT demonstrates improved performance relative to the base model, particularly on:

Theory-driven reasoning questions
Structured scientific problem solving
Interpretation of experimental images

These improvements primarily manifest at inference time, highlighting the role of post-training in shaping reasoning accessibility rather than training-time memorization alone.

Citation

If you use this model or the MATRIX benchmark, please cite the accompanying paper:

MATRIX: A Multimodal Benchmark and Post-Training Framework for Materials Science

Bibtex

@article{mcgrath2026matrix,
  title   = {MATRIX: A Multimodal Benchmark and Post-Training Framework for Materials Science},
  author  = {McGrath, Delia and Chong, Curtis and Kulkarni, Rohil and Ceder, Gerbrand and Kolluru, Adeesh},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00376},
  year    = {2026}
}

Framework Versions

PEFT: 0.18.0
Transformers: 4.56.0+
PyTorch: 2.0.0+
Python: 3.10+