Synergistic Summarization: An Ensemble of Fine-Tuned and Large-Scale Language Models for Factual and Coherent Scientific Abstracts

Abstract

The exponential growth of scientific literature has intensified the demand for automated summarization systems capable of producing abstracts that are both linguistically fluent and factually reliable. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: encoder-decoder models such as BART and T5 maintain strong factual grounding but produce rigid, extractive outputs, while decoder-only large language models (LLMs) such as Llama and Gemma generate highly fluent text yet remain susceptible to hallucination. This paper proposes a two-stage Synergistic Hybrid Ensemble framework designed to resolve this dichotomy. In Stage 1, a fine-tuned BART-Large model generates a factually grounded scaffold draft from a structured input representation comprising the document title, key sentences, method highlights, and results summary. In Stage 2, a QLoRA-adapted Llama-3.2-1B model performs coherent rewriting and stylistic polishing by conditioning on both the scaffold draft and the original source document. Experiments conducted on the arXiv Scientific Research Papers Dataset using BERTScore and entailment-based Factual Consistency metrics demonstrate that the proposed ensemble achieves a Factual Consistency metrics demonstrate that the proposed ensemble achieves a Factual Consistency score of 0.9140, substantially outperforming BART-Large (0.2890) and Llama-3.2-1B (0.6630) individually. Although the ensemble incurs a marginal reduction in BERTScore (0.8980) relative to Llama-3.2-1B (0.9555), this trade-off is justified given the critical importance of factual reliability in high-stakes scientific discourse. These findings confirm that anchoring the generative capacity of decoder-only LLMs to verified factual scaffolds effectively mitigates hallucination risk, offering a scalable and reproducible solution for high-fidelity scientific abstract generation.