# TofuEval: Evaluating Hallucinations of LLMs on Topic-Focused Dialogue Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SAMSum Corpus: A Human-annotated Dialogue Dataset for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12237/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05802/) (2022)
- [News Summarization and Evaluation in the Era of GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12356/) (2022)
- [AlignScore: Evaluating Factual Consistency with a Unified Alignment Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16739/) (2023)
- [Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13346/) (2021)
- [RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08726/) (2022)
- [QAFactEval: Improved QA-Based Factual Consistency Evaluation for Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08542/) (2021)
- [Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08960/) (2019)
- [Annotating and Modeling Fine-grained Factuality in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04302/) (2021)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [MediaSum: A Large-scale Media Interview Dataset for Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06410/) (2021)
- [Understanding Factual Errors in Summarization: Errors, Summarizers, Datasets, Error Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12854/) (2022)
- [MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17529/) (2023)
- [CONFIT: Toward Faithful Dialogue Summarization with Linguistically-Informed Contrastive Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08713/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10774/) (2024)
- [Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07016/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Survey of Text Summarization: From Statistical Methods to Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11289/) (2024)
- [AdaCAD: Adaptively Decoding to Balance Conflicts between Contextual and Parametric Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07394/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Useful LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00936/) (2024)
- [Learning to Refine with Fine-Grained Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02397/) (2024)
- [Learning to Summarize from LLM-generated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13116/) (2024)
- [FaithBench: A Diverse Hallucination Benchmark for Summarization by Modern LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13210/) (2024)
- [On Positional Bias of Faithfulness for Long-form Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23609/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking LLM Faithfulness in RAG with Evolving Leaderboards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04847/) (2025)
- [Reading Subtext: Evaluating Large Language Models on Short Story Summarization with Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01061/) (2024)
- [FIZZ: Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11184/) (2024)
- [FactCG: Enhancing Fact Checkers with Graph-Based Multi-Hop Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17144/) (2025)
- [Verifying the Verifiers: Unveiling Pitfalls and Potentials in Fact Verifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13342/) (2025)
- [Do Automatic Factuality Metrics Measure Factuality? A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16638/) (2024)
- [Towards Multi-dimensional Evaluation of LLM Summarization across Domains and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00549/) (2025)
- [Faithful, Unfaithful or Ambiguous? Multi-Agent Debate with Initial Stance for Summary Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08514/) (2025)
- [CoCoA: Confidence and Context-Aware Adaptive Decoding for Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17670/) (2025)
- [STORYSUMM: Evaluating Faithfulness in Story Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06501/) (2024)
- [MAMM-Refine: A Recipe for Improving Faithfulness in Generation with Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15272/) (2025)
- [Truth or Mirage? Towards End-to-End Factuality Evaluation with LLM-Oasis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19655/) (2024)
- [Verify with Caution: The Pitfalls of Relying on Imperfect Factuality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14883/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Automatic Hallucination Evaluation on Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12041/) (2024)
- [MEMERAG: A Multilingual End-to-End Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17163/) (2025)
- [Multi-Party Conversational Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18845/) (2025)
- [Toward Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08892/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-CV: Fine-tuning Powerful Reasoning LLMs for Knowledge-Assisted Claim Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12348/) (2025)
- [Reasoning or Not? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning LLMs for Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02145/) (2025)
- [Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08024/) (2025)
- [Localizing and Mitigating Errors in Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11930/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single document news summarization has seen substantial progress on faithfulness in recent years, driven by research on the evaluation of factual consistency, or hallucinations. We ask whether these advances carry over to other text summarization domains. We propose a new evaluation benchmark on topic-focused dialogue summarization, generated by LLMs of varying sizes. We provide binary sentence-level human annotations of the factual consistency of these summaries along with detailed explanations of factually inconsistent sentences. Our analysis shows that existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors in the dialogue domain, regardless of the model's size. On the other hand, when LLMs, including GPT-4, serve as binary factual evaluators, they perform poorly and can be outperformed by prevailing state-of-the-art specialized factuality evaluation metrics. Finally, we conducted an analysis of hallucination types with a curated error taxonomy. We find that there are diverse errors and error distributions in model-generated summaries and that non-LLM based metrics can capture all error types better than LLM-based evaluators.