TrueBrief: Faithful Summarization through Small Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency in generating high-quality text; however, their propensity for producing hallucinations poses a significant challenge for their deployment in security-critical domains. In this work, we present TrueBrief, an end-to-end framework specifically designed to enhance the faithfulness of small LLMs (SLMs) primarily for the task of text summarization through a preference-optimization paradigm. Central to our framework is a data generation module that facilitates controlled hallucination injection to generate synthetic preference data. Our work provides insights into the impact of data quality and model size on preference-based optimization, highlighting the conditions under which these methods are most effective.