# FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09984/) (2020)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13346/) (2021)
- [The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01672/) (2021)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08014/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02443/) (2019)
- [CTRLsum: Towards Generic Controllable Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04281/) (2020)
- [Optimizing the Factual Correctness of a Summary: A Study of Summarizing Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02541/) (2019)
- [Seq2Sick: Evaluating the Robustness of Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01128/) (2018)
- [Improving Faithfulness in Abstractive Summarization with Contrast Candidate Generation and Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09061/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Graph-Augmented Abstractive Summarization with Semantic-Driven Cloze Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01159/) (2020)
- [Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02443/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [WeCheck: Strong Factual Consistency Checker via Weakly Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10057/) (2022)
- [Effective Slogan Generation with Noise Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04472/) (2023)
- [AdvSumm: Adversarial Training for Bias Mitigation in Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06273/) (2025)
- [Entity-level Factual Adaptiveness of Fine-tuning based Abstractive Summarization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15162/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite being able to generate fluent and grammatical text, current Seq2Seq summarization models still suffering from the unfaithful generation problem. In this paper, we study the faithfulness of existing systems from a new perspective of factual robustness which is the ability to correctly generate factual information over adversarial unfaithful information. We first measure a model's factual robustness by its success rate to defend against adversarial attacks when generating factual information. The factual robustness analysis on a wide range of current systems shows its good consistency with human judgments on faithfulness. Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of a model by enhancing its factual robustness. Specifically, we propose a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarial perturbations. Extensive automatic and human evaluation results show that FRSUM consistently improves the faithfulness of various Seq2Seq models, such as T5, BART.