packing named arguments into a dict

Question

I know I can turn function arguments into a dictionary if the function takes in **kwargs.

def bar(**kwargs):
    return kwargs

print bar(a=1, b=2)
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

However, is the opposite true? Can I pack named arguments into a dictionary and return them? The hand-coded version looks like this:

def foo(a, b):
    return {'a': a, 'b': b}

But it seems like there must be a better way. Note that i am trying to avoid using **kwargs in the function (named arguments work better for an IDE with code completion).