mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

DS2-Instruct: Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for Large Language Models Instruction Tuning

arXiv 2603.12932 ↗First posted 13 Mar 2026cs.CLcited by 4

On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Code and instruction data synthesis

Abstract (arXiv)

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains requires high-quality instruction tuning datasets, which are expensive to create through human annotation. Existing data synthesis methods focus on general-purpose tasks and fail to capture domain-specific terminology and reasoning patterns. To address this, we introduce DS2-Instruct, a zero-shot framework that generates domain-specific instruction datasets without human supervision. Our approach first generates task-informed keywords to ensure comprehensive domain coverage. It then creates diverse instructions by pairing these keywords with different cognitive levels from Bloom's Taxonomy. Finally, it uses self-consistency validation to ensure data quality. We apply this framework to generate datasets across seven challenging domains, such as mathematics, finance, and logical reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that models fine-tuned on our generated data achieve substantial improvements over existing data generation methods.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Code and instruction data synthesis, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 26 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

Builds on

26 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Instruction-Tuning Data Synthesis from Scratch via Web Reconstruction22 Apr
  2. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions20 Dec

Other references · 24

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  2. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  3. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
  4. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  5. 2022Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledgecited by 1,807
  6. 2022Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCodecited by 1,427
  7. 2022Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Modelscited by 1,359
  8. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  9. 2021Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokenscited by 1,278
  10. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
  11. 2022Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Modelscited by 940
  12. 2022Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Taskscited by 858
12 more
  1. 2023Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversationscited by 825
  2. 2022Galactica: A Large Language Model for Sciencecited by 736
  3. 2023The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuningcited by 734
  4. 2021Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructionscited by 696
  5. 2022Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Laborcited by 395
  6. 2023PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Financecited by 217
  7. 2022Natural Language to Code Translation with Executioncited by 122
  8. 2024Self-Consistency Preference Optimizationcited by 50
  9. 2025CoT-Self-Instruct: Building high-quality synthetic prompts for reasoning and non-reasoning taskscited by 30
  10. 2024Learning to Generate Instruction Tuning Datasets for Zero-Shot Task Adaptationcited by 27
  11. 2023Flacuna: Unleashing the Problem Solving Power of Vicuna using FLAN Fine-Tuningcited by 18
  12. 2023Explore-Instruct: Enhancing Domain-Specific Instruction Coverage through Active Explorationcited by 18

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024MAmmoTH2: Scaling Instructions from the Web
  2. 2026Constructing Synthetic Instruction Datasets for Improving Reasoning in Domain-Specific LLMs: A Case Study in the Japanese Financial Domain
  3. 2024Synthetic Data (Almost) from Scratch: Generalized Instruction Tuning for Language Models
  4. 2026Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for LLMs via Minimal Sufficient Representation Learning
  5. 2025Towards Alignment-Centric Paradigm: A Survey of Instruction Tuning in Large Language Models
  6. 2025Scaling Instruction-Tuned LLMs to Million-Token Contexts via Hierarchical Synthetic Data Generation
  7. 2026InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Differential Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning
  8. 2025Generalizing From Short to Long: Effective Data Synthesis for Long-Context Instruction Tuning