{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-multi-document-coverage-reward-for-relaxed-1","title":"A Multi-Document Coverage Reward for RELAXed Multi-Document Summarization","arxiv_id":"2203.02894","date":"2022-03-06","proceeding":"ACL 2022 5","authors":["Jacob Parnell","Inigo Jauregi Unanue","Massimo Piccardi"],"abstract":"Multi-document summarization (MDS) has made significant progress in recent years, in part facilitated by the availability of new, dedicated datasets and capacious language models. However, a standing limitation of these models is that they are trained against limited references and with plain maximum-likelihood objectives. As for many other generative tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) offers the potential to improve the training of MDS models; yet, it requires a carefully-designed reward that can ensure appropriate leverage of both the reference summaries and the input documents. For this reason, in this paper we propose fine-tuning an MDS baseline with a reward that balances a reference-based metric such as ROUGE with coverage of the input documents. To implement the approach, we utilize RELAX (Grathwohl et al., 2018), a contemporary gradient estimator which is both low-variance and unbiased, and we fine-tune the baseline in a few-shot style for both stability and computational efficiency. Experimental results over the Multi-News and WCEP MDS datasets show significant improvements of up to +0.95 pp average ROUGE score and +3.17 pp METEOR score over the baseline, and competitive results with the literature. In addition, they show that the coverage of the input documents is increased, and evenly across all documents.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02894v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02894v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-multi-document-coverage-reward-for-relaxed-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/jacob-parnell-rozetta/longformer_coverage","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"document-summarization","task_name":"Document Summarization"},{"task_slug":"multi-document-summarization","task_name":"Multi-Document Summarization"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.02894","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}