mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Agentic Adversarial QA for Improving Domain-Specific LLMs

arXiv 2602.18137 ↗First posted 20 Feb 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite extensive pretraining on broad internet corpora, often struggle to adapt effectively to specialized domains. There is growing interest in fine-tuning these models for such domains; however, progress is constrained by the scarcity and limited coverage of high-quality, task-relevant data. To address this, synthetic data generation methods such as paraphrasing or knowledge extraction are commonly applied. Although these approaches excel at factual recall and conceptual knowledge, they suffer from two critical shortcomings: (i) they provide minimal support for interpretive reasoning capabilities in these specialized domains, and (ii) they often produce synthetic corpora that are excessively large and redundant, resulting in poor sample efficiency. To overcome these gaps, we propose an adversarial question-generation framework that produces a compact set of semantically challenging questions. These questions are constructed by comparing the outputs of the model to be adapted and a robust expert model grounded in reference documents, using an iterative, feedback-driven process designed to reveal and address comprehension gaps. Evaluation on specialized subsets of the LegalBench corpus demonstrates that our method achieves greater accuracy with substantially fewer synthetic samples.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2026.

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14 of 23 references.

References · 14

  1. 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,243
  2. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  3. 2019BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text miningcited by 1,935
  4. 2020Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Taskscited by 1,548
  5. 2023Large Language Models as Optimizerscited by 830
  6. 2017An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networkscited by 791
  7. 2018Learning Models with Uniform Performance via Distributionally Robust Optimizationcited by 334
  8. 2017Certifying Some Distributional Robustness with Principled Adversarial Trainingcited by 333
  9. 2023LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 328
  10. 2021CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Reviewcited by 232
  11. 2023Fine-Tuning or Retrieval? Comparing Knowledge Injection in LLMscited by 175
  12. 2024Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modelingcited by 156
2 more
  1. 2024Synthetic continued pretrainingcited by 56
  2. 2025Knowledge-Instruct: Effective Continual Pre-training from Limited Data using Instructionscited by 11

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  1. 2026Domain-Adaptation through Synthetic Data: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for German Law
  2. 2024Balancing Cost and Effectiveness of Synthetic Data Generation Strategies for LLMs
  3. 2025Synthetic Data Generation Using Large Language Models: Advances in Text and Code
  4. 2026SCORE: Specificity, Context Utilization, Robustness, and Relevance for Reference-Free LLM Evaluation
  5. 2024TestAgent: Automatic Benchmarking and Exploratory Interaction for Evaluating LLMs in Vertical Domains
  6. 2024The Future of Learning in the Age of Generative AI: Automated Question Generation and Assessment with Large Language Models
  7. 2024SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains
  8. 2024Prompting-based Synthetic Data Generation for Few-Shot Question Answering