about
Fine-Tuning LLMs for Report Summarization (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Apr 4, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They trained large language models further on report examples, with and without human-written reference summaries, to see if better summaries are possible on just one or two graphics cards and how to score them. Often the training improved quality; otherwise it cut broken summaries.

Abstract · Fine-Tuning LLMs for Report Summarization: Analysis on Supervised and Unsupervised Data

We study the efficacy of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for the specific task of report (government archives, news, intelligence reports) summarization. While this topic is being very actively researched - our specific application set-up faces two challenges: (i) ground-truth summaries maybe unavailable (e.g., for government archives), and (ii) availability of limited compute power - the sensitive nature of the application requires that computation is performed on-premise and for most of our experiments we use one or two A100 GPU cards. Under this set-up we conduct experiments to answer the following questions. First, given that fine-tuning the LLMs can be resource intensive, is it feasible to fine-tune them for improved report summarization capabilities on-premise? Second, what are the metrics we could leverage to assess the quality of these summaries? We conduct experiments on two different fine-tuning approaches in parallel and our findings reveal interesting trends regarding the utility of fine-tuning LLMs. Specifically, we find that in many cases, fine-tuning helps improve summary quality and in other cases it helps by reducing the number of invalid or garbage summaries.

Swati Rallapalli, Shannon Gallagher, Andrew O. Mellinger, Jasmine Ratchford, Anusha Sinha, Tyler Brooks, William R. Nichols, Nick Winski, Bryan Brown
arXiv:2503.10676 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 10, 2025 · updated Apr 13, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN