Reducing Hallucinations in Summarization via Reinforcement Learning with Entity Hallucination Index

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Main Authors: Katwe, Praveenkumar, Chandra, Rakesh, Kali, Balabantaray, Vittala, Prasad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866915417742639104
author Katwe, Praveenkumar
Chandra, Rakesh
Kali, Balabantaray
Vittala, Prasad
author_facet Katwe, Praveenkumar
Chandra, Rakesh
Kali, Balabantaray
Vittala, Prasad
contents Reducing hallucinations in abstractive summarization remains a critical challenge for deploying language models (LMs) in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a rewarddriven fine-tuning framework that explicitly optimizes for Entity Hallucination Index (EHI), a metric designed to quantify the presence, correctness, and grounding of named entities in generated summaries. Given a corpus of meeting transcripts, we first generate baseline summaries using a pre-trained LM and compute EHI scores via automatic entity extraction and matching. We then apply reinforcement learning to fine-tune the model parameters, using EHI as a reward signal to bias generation toward entity-faithful outputs. Our approach does not rely on human-written factuality annotations, enabling scalable fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in EHI across datasets, with qualitative analysis revealing a significant reduction in entity-level hallucinations without degradation in fluency or informativeness. We release a reproducible Colab pipeline, facilitating further research on hallucination-aware model fine-tuning using lightweight, hallucintion metrics like EHI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22744
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reducing Hallucinations in Summarization via Reinforcement Learning with Entity Hallucination Index
Katwe, Praveenkumar
Chandra, Rakesh
Kali, Balabantaray
Vittala, Prasad
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
68T50
I.2.7
Reducing hallucinations in abstractive summarization remains a critical challenge for deploying language models (LMs) in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a rewarddriven fine-tuning framework that explicitly optimizes for Entity Hallucination Index (EHI), a metric designed to quantify the presence, correctness, and grounding of named entities in generated summaries. Given a corpus of meeting transcripts, we first generate baseline summaries using a pre-trained LM and compute EHI scores via automatic entity extraction and matching. We then apply reinforcement learning to fine-tune the model parameters, using EHI as a reward signal to bias generation toward entity-faithful outputs. Our approach does not rely on human-written factuality annotations, enabling scalable fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in EHI across datasets, with qualitative analysis revealing a significant reduction in entity-level hallucinations without degradation in fluency or informativeness. We release a reproducible Colab pipeline, facilitating further research on hallucination-aware model fine-tuning using lightweight, hallucintion metrics like EHI.
title Reducing Hallucinations in Summarization via Reinforcement Learning with Entity Hallucination Index
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
68T50
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22744