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DS$^2$-Instruct: Domain-Specific Data Synthesis for Large Language Models Instruction Tuning

arXiv cs.CL / 3/16/2026

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Key Points

  • DS^2-Instruct is a zero-shot framework for generating domain-specific instruction datasets to improve instruction tuning of LLMs without human supervision.
  • The method first generates task-informed keywords to ensure comprehensive coverage of domain terminology and concepts.
  • It then creates diverse instructions by pairing these keywords with different cognitive levels from Bloom's Taxonomy to capture varying reasoning tasks.
  • A self-consistency validation step is applied to ensure data quality, and the approach is demonstrated across seven challenging domains (including mathematics, finance, and logical reasoning) with substantial improvements over existing data generation methods.

Abstract

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 DS^2-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.