The progress on the integrated circuits promotes the development of chips towards high integration and high performance. The resulting high heat flux brings serious challenges to the thermal management of chips. Polymers are favored to be used as materials for the purpose of heat dissipation since they have the advantages of excellent mechanical properties characteristic of softness and the ease of processibility. Limited to the low intrinsic thermal conductivity of polymers, filling highly thermally conductive fillers to fabricate polymer-based composites with high thermal conductivity is the currently main approach to realize the commercial applications. This paper reviewed the advances and applications in liquid metal-filled polymer-based thermally conductive materials. Based on the previous work, the distribution of liquid metal in the polymer matrix can be classified into three classes including discontinuous distribution, unidirectional continuous distribution and three-dimensional continuous distribution. The heat transfer mechanism of thermal interface materials, polymer-based liquid metals, methods of fabrication, thermally conductive properties and technical bottleneck of these composites with different distribution of liquid metal have been introduced. At last, the outlook on the future studies on the liquid metal-filled polymer-based thermally conductive materials has also been proposed.