PANGEA: Projection-Based Augmentation with Non-Relevant General Data for Enhanced Domain Adaptation in LLMs

Modern large language models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks through zero-shot or few-shot prompting. However, domain-specific tasks often still require fine-tuning, which is frequently hindered by data scarcity, i.e., collecting sufficient domain-specific data remains a practical challenge. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic data using LLMs by augmenting a small set of available domain-specific examples. In this work, we first identify fundamental limitations of such approach in terms of both data diversity and quality, particularly when relying on only a handful of domain-specific examples. We then propose our method, PANGEA, which leverages large-scale, publicly available general-purpose data---entirely unrelated to the target domain---to generate more diverse and higher-quality synthetic data. Our extensive experiments on domain-specific benchmarks, including GSM8K, MedQA, and FinQA, as well as a custom domain-specific language task, validate the effectiveness of our approach.