# Should We Fine-Tune or RAG? Evaluating Different Techniques to Adapt LLMs for Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06399/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00300/) (2019)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Evaluation Metrics Used for NLG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12009/) (2020)
- [Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05797/) (2022)
- [A Dataset for Document Grounded Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07358/) (2018)
- [Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11364/) (2020)
- [Topical-Chat: Towards Knowledge-Grounded Open-Domain Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11995/) (2023)
- [doc2dial: A Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06623/) (2020)
- [Inseq: An Interpretability Toolkit for Sequence Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13942/) (2023)
- [Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03533/) (2020)
- [Are LLMs All You Need for Task-Oriented Dialogue?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06556/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Model Internals-based Answer Attribution for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13663/) (2024)
- [Do Large Language Models Need a Content Delivery Network?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13761/) (2024)
- [LLMs as Repositories of Factual Knowledge: Limitations and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12774/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Be Trusted for Evaluating RAG Systems? A Survey of Methods and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20119/) (2025)
- [Strada-LLM: Graph LLM for traffic prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20856/) (2024)
- [What Does Loss Optimization Actually Teach, If Anything? Knowledge Dynamics in Continual Pre-training of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03858/) (2026)
- [The Oracle Has Spoken: A Multi-Aspect Evaluation of Dialogue in Pythia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16487/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of response generation in human-machine dialogue. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature for different dialogue types (e.g., Open-Domain). However, the evaluations of these techniques have been limited in terms of base LLMs, dialogue types and evaluation metrics. In this work, we extensively analyze different LLM adaptation techniques when applied to different dialogue types. We have selected two base LLMs, Llama-2 and Mistral, and four dialogue types Open-Domain, Knowledge-Grounded, Task-Oriented, and Question Answering. We evaluate the performance of in-context learning and fine-tuning techniques across datasets selected for each dialogue type. We assess the impact of incorporating external knowledge to ground the generation in both scenarios of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and gold knowledge. We adopt consistent evaluation and explainability criteria for automatic metrics and human evaluation protocols. Our analysis shows that there is no universal best-technique for adapting large language models as the efficacy of each technique depends on both the base LLM and the specific type of dialogue. Last but not least, the assessment of the best adaptation technique should include human evaluation to avoid false expectations and outcomes derived from automatic metrics.