Abstract: Gravitational waves open a new avenue to study dark matter through the dynamics of compact objects. Non-annihilating dark matter captured by neutron stars can induce their collapse into low-mass black holes, leading to subsolar-mass mergers detectable by current and future observatories. Such events probe dark matter–nucleon interactions at cross-sections below the neutrino floor and masses spanning GeV to PeV. Existing LIGO/Virgo data already yield strong bounds, while future detections could reveal dark core collapse and account for puzzles such as the missing pulsars near the Galactic Center. I will outline these constraints, the prospects for distinguishing low-mass black holes from neutron stars via gravitational wave signatures, and the implications for dark matter. Finally, I will discuss more model-independent probes using compact binaries near galactic centers, which can confirm or rule out parsec-scale density spikes and may be used to constrain broad classes of dark matter models.