# Cognitively Layered Data Synthesis for Domain Adaptation of LLMs to Space Situational Awareness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09231/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/synth/synthetic-reasoning-data-and-bootstrapping/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

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- [Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08464/) (2024)
- [OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04178/) (2025)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on general-purpose tasks. however, transferring them to complex engineering domains such as space situational awareness (SSA) remains challenging owing to insufficient structural alignment with mission chains, the absence of higher-order cognitive supervision, and poor correspondence between data quality criteria and engineering specifications. The core bottleneck is the construction of high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets. To this end, we propose BD-FDG (Bloom's Taxonomy-based Domain-specific Fine-tuning Data Generation), a framework that addresses incomplete knowledge coverage, shallow cognitive depth, and limited quality controllability through three mechanisms: structured knowledge organization, cognitively layered question modeling, and automated quality control. The framework uses a knowledge tree to ensure structured corpus coverage, designs a question generation scheme spanning nine categories and six cognitive levels from Remember to Create to produce samples with a continuous difficulty gradient, and applies a multidimensional scoring pipeline to enforce domain rigor and consistency. Using BD-FDG, we construct SSA-SFT, a domain dataset of approximately 230K samples, and fine-tune Qwen3-8B to obtain SSA-LLM-8B. Experiments show that SSA-LLM-8B achieves relative BLEU-1 improvements of 144% (no-think) and 176% (think) on the domain test set and a win rate of 82.21% over the baseline in arena comparisons, while largely preserving general benchmark performance (MMLU-Pro, MATH-500). These results validate SFT data construction driven by cognitive layering as an effective paradigm for complex engineering domains and provide a transferable framework for domain-specific LLM adaptation.