KaFT: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Boosting LLMs' Domain-specific Question-Answering Performance

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission3877 Authors

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common approach to improve the domain-specific question-answering (QA) performance of large language models (LLMs). However, recent literature reveals that due to the conflicts between LLMs' internal knowledge and the context knowledge of training data, vanilla SFT using the full QA training set is usually suboptimal. In this paper, we first design a query diversification strategy for robust conflict detection and then conduct a series of experiments to analyze the impact of knowledge conflict. We find that 1) training samples with varied conflicts contribute differently, where SFT on the data with large conflicts leads to catastrophic performance drops; 2) compared to directly filtering out the conflict data, appropriately applying the conflict data would be more beneficial. Motivated by this, we propose a simple-yet-effective Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning (namely KaFT) approach to effectively boost LLMs' performance. The core of KaFT is to adapt the training weight by assigning different rewards for different training samples according to conflict level. Extensive experiments show that KaFT brings consistent and significant improvements (up to +5.73% average scores) across four LLMs. More analyses prove that KaFT effectively improves the model generalization and alleviates the hallucination.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: fine-tuning, clinical NLP, knowledge conflict

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3877