Efficient Tuning of Large Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable text comprehension and generation capabilities but often lack the ability to utilize up-to-date or domain-specific knowledge not included in their training data. To address this gap, we introduce KEDiT, an efficient method for fine-tuning LLMs for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. KEDiT operates in two main phases: first, it employs an information bottleneck to compress retrieved knowledge into learnable parameters, retaining essential information while minimizing computational overhead. Second, a lightweight knowledge-aware adapter integrates these compressed knowledge vectors into the LLM during fine-tuning, updating less than 2\% of the model parameters. The experimental results on the Wizard of Wikipedia and a newly constructed PubMed-Dialog dataset demonstrate that KEDiT excels in generating contextually relevant and informative responses, outperforming competitive baselines in automatic, LLM-based, and human evaluations. This approach effectively combines the strengths of pretrained LLMs with the adaptability needed for incorporating dynamic knowledge, presenting a scalable solution for fields such as medicine.

@article{zhang2025_2504.07754,
  title={ Efficient Tuning of Large Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation },
  author={ Bo Zhang and Hui Ma and Dailin Li and Jian Ding and Jian Wang and Bo Xu and HongFei Lin },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07754},
  year={ 2025 }
}