# Agentic Adversarial QA for Improving Domain-Specific LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18137/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Certifying Some Distributional Robustness with Principled Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10571/) (2017)
- [LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11462/) (2023)
- [Learning Models with Uniform Performance via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08750/) (2018)
- [CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06268/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning or Retrieval? Comparing Knowledge Injection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05934/) (2023)
- [Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16380/) (2024)
- [Synthetic continued pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07431/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-Instruct: Effective Continual Pre-training from Limited Data using Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05571/) (2025)

## 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.