# Correcting Diverse Factual Errors in Abstractive Summarization via Post-Editing and Language Model Infilling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12378/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03754/) (2020)
- [Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13346/) (2021)
- [Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08960/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10792/) (2018)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [Annotating and Modeling Fine-grained Factuality in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04302/) (2021)
- [Enabling Language Models to Fill in the Blanks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05339/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Factuality in Generation with Dependency-level Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05478/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [Factual Error Correction for Abstractive Summarization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08712/) (2020)
- [Assessing The Factual Accuracy of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13322/) (2019)
- [The Factual Inconsistency Problem in Abstractive Text Summarization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14839/) (2021)
- [Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02443/) (2020)
- [FactPEGASUS: Factuality-Aware Pre-training and Fine-tuning for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07830/) (2022)
- [Learning to Revise References for Faithful Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10290/) (2022)
- [Don't Say What You Don't Know: Improving the Consistency of Abstractive Summarization by Constraining Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08436/) (2022)
- [Faithful to the Document or to the World? Mitigating Hallucinations via Entity-linked Knowledge in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13761/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Aging with GRACE: Lifelong Model Editing with Discrete Key-Value Adaptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11031/) (2022)
- [Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06855/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Process-Oriented Automatic Text Summarization with Exploration of LLM-Based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02901/) (2024)
- [TrueTeacher: Learning Factual Consistency Evaluation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11171/) (2023)
- [Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15269/) (2024)
- [MyVLM: Personalizing VLMs for User-Specific Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14599/) (2024)
- [FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/) (2023)
- [PURR: Efficiently Editing Language Model Hallucinations by Denoising Language Model Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14908/) (2023)
- [Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00935/) (2023)
- [On Improving Summarization Factual Consistency from Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09968/) (2022)
- [Learning to Refine with Fine-Grained Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02397/) (2024)
- [RST-LoRA: A Discourse-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for Long Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00657/) (2024)
- [Improved Beam Search for Hallucination Mitigation in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02712/) (2022)
- [Annotating and Detecting Fine-grained Factual Errors for Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16548/) (2023)
- [MEMOIR: Lifelong Model Editing with Minimal Overwrite and Informed Retention for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07899/) (2025)
- [MAMM-Refine: A Recipe for Improving Faithfulness in Generation with Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15272/) (2025)
- [Expository Text Generation: Imitate, Retrieve, Paraphrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03276/) (2023)
- [Revealing and Mitigating Over-Attention in Knowledge Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14838/) (2025)
- [Improving Factuality of Abstractive Summarization without Sacrificing Summary Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14981/) (2023)
- [Reference Matters: Benchmarking Factual Error Correction for Dialogue Summarization with Fine-grained Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05119/) (2023)
- [Quantum Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19758/) (2024)
- [Factual Dialogue Summarization via Learning from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14709/) (2024)
- [USB: A Unified Summarization Benchmark Across Tasks and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14296/) (2023)
- [Parameter Efficient Audio Captioning With Faithful Guidance Using Audio-text Shared Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03340/) (2023)
- [KGQuiz: Evaluating the Generalization of Encoded Knowledge in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09725/) (2023)
- [P^3SUM: Preserving Author's Perspective in News Summarization with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09741/) (2023)
- [Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10408/) (2024)
- [Correcting Hallucinations in News Summaries: Exploration of Self-Correcting LLM Methods with External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19607/) (2025)
- [You Can Generate It Again: Data-to-Text Generation with Verification and Correction Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15933/) (2023)
- [ISQA: Informative Factuality Feedback for Scientific Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13246/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or hallucinated content. Recent works focus on correcting factual errors in generated summaries via post-editing. Such correction models are trained using adversarial non-factual summaries constructed using heuristic rules for injecting errors. However, generating non-factual summaries using heuristics often does not generalize well to actual model errors. In this work, we propose to generate hard, representative synthetic examples of non-factual summaries through infilling language models. With this data, we train a more robust fact-correction model to post-edit the summaries to improve factual consistency. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments on two popular summarization datasets -- CNN/DM and XSum -- we show that our approach vastly outperforms prior methods in correcting erroneous summaries. Our model -- FactEdit -- improves factuality scores by over ~11 points on CNN/DM and over ~31 points on XSum on average across multiple summarization models, producing more factual summaries while maintaining competitive summarization quality.