# Towards a Robust Retrieval-Based Summarization System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19889/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [News Summarization and Evaluation in the Era of GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12356/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01431/) (2023)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11080/) (2018)
- [Retrieval Augmented Code Generation and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11601/) (2021)
- [Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07981/) (2022)
- [Tug-of-War Between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14409/) (2024)
- [Skeleton-to-Response: Dialogue Generation Guided by Retrieval Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05296/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06872/) (2025)
- [CROPS: A Deployable Crop Management System Over All Possible State Availabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06034/) (2024)
- [A Unified Retrieval Framework with Document Ranking and EDU Filtering for Multi-document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16711/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Zero-Shot Scientific Summarisation: A Pilot Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00931/) (2025)
- [Don't Scroll Back: Missing-Evidence Memory for Streaming Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09043/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes an investigation of the robustness of large language models (LLMs) for retrieval augmented generation (RAG)-based summarization tasks. While LLMs provide summarization capabilities, their performance in complex, real-world scenarios remains under-explored. Our first contribution is LogicSumm, an innovative evaluation framework incorporating realistic scenarios to assess LLM robustness during RAG-based summarization. Based on limitations identified by LogiSumm, we then developed SummRAG, a comprehensive system to create training dialogues and fine-tune a model to enhance robustness within LogicSumm's scenarios. SummRAG is an example of our goal of defining structured methods to test the capabilities of an LLM, rather than addressing issues in a one-off fashion. Experimental results confirm the power of SummRAG, showcasing improved logical coherence and summarization quality. Data, corresponding model weights, and Python code are available online.