Salute improves large language models for military defense tasks
SALUTE: Benchmarking and Adapting LLMs for the Defense Domain
Computation and Language
Summary
Understanding military language and concepts is difficult because they use special words and ideas that change often. The authors created SALUTE, a complete approach to help large language models learn and understand defense language better by using military documents and news. They also made tests to check how well the models understand military topics. Their improved model, Salute-LLM, understands military texts well and still works well on everyday language tasks.
What this means in practice
- •For defense technology teams: Build AI systems that better understand military terminology and operations using SALUTE-trained language models.
- •For news analysis teams: Use defense-aware language models to automatically summarize and interpret decade-long military news data.
Authors
Hyeongcheol Park, Sumin In, Suyeon Myeong, Hogun Park, Sangmin Kim, Moonhyun Lee, Daekyeong Park, Sangpil Kim
Abstract
Defense is a knowledge-intensive domain that requires precise understanding of specialized terminology, doctrinal concepts, operational procedures, and evolving military events. Although recent work has explored language technologies for military applications, existing efforts remain fragmented: they are often task-specific, rely on limited adaptation pipelines, or lack comprehensive defense-domain evaluation. In this paper, we present SALUTE, an end-to-end framework for benchmarking and adapting LLMs for the defense domain. SALUTE integrates Salute-Corpus, a curated corpus from open-access U.S. military doctrine and government documents; Salute-Conv, a grounded instruction dataset from doctrinal sources and decade-long defense news; Salute-Pref, a defense-aware preference dataset; and Salute-Bench, a rigorously filtered benchmark for evaluating defense-domain understanding and reasoning over doctrine and defense news. Based on these resources, we train Salute-LLM through multi-stage post-training with continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference alignment. Extensive experiments show that Salute-LLM achieves strong defense-domain performance while retaining competitive general capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of SALUTE as an end-to-end framework for defense-domain LLM adaptation.