Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Zirui Song, Bin Yan, Yuhan Liu, Miao Fang, Mingzhe Li, Rui Yan, Xiuying Chen


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various tasks such as natural language understanding, text summarization, and machine translation. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge, such as healthcare, chemistry, or legal analysis. To address this, researchers have explored diverse methods to enhance LLMs by integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of these methods, which we categorize into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. Each approach offers unique mechanisms to equip LLMs with domain expertise, balancing trade-offs between flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. We discuss how these methods enable LLMs to tackle specialized tasks, compare their advantages and disadvantages, evaluate domain-specific LLMs against general LLMs, and highlight the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. For those interested in delving deeper into this area, we also summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source at: blueofficial-repo.com, dedicated to documenting research in the field of specialized LLM.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1379
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25297–25311
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.1379/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1379
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zirui Song, Bin Yan, Yuhan Liu, Miao Fang, Mingzhe Li, Rui Yan, and Xiuying Chen. 2025. Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 25297–25311, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (Song et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.1379.pdf
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