scitldr-qwen2.5-0.5b-summarizer

Scientific Paper Summarizer (SciTLDR)

A fine-tuned Qwen2.5-0.5B model for generating one-sentence TL;DR summaries of scientific paper abstracts.

Trained entirely on consumer hardware (RTX 2070, 8GB VRAM) using QLoRA.

Benchmark Results

Evaluated on the official SciTLDR-A test set (618 papers) using MAX ROUGE across multiple references:

Key Achievement: Outperforms BERTSUMEXT while using QLoRA on consumer hardware.

Model Description

Training Pipeline

This model was trained using a two-stage fine-tuning approach:

Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct → CPT (Domain Adaptation) → SFT (Task Training) → This Model

Stage 1: Continued Pretraining (CPT)

• Purpose: Adapt the model to scientific language and terminology
• Data: 50,000 arXiv abstracts from the scientific_papers dataset
• Objective: Next-token prediction on domain text
• Result: -44% perplexity on scientific text

Stage 2: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)

• Purpose: Teach the specific summarization task format
• Data: 1,992 examples from SciTLDR (abstract → TL;DR pairs)
• Objective: Generate one-sentence summaries
• Result: +39.5% ROUGE-L improvement over base model

Why Two Stages?

We discovered that CPT alone degrades task performance (-18.5% ROUGE-L). The model learns domain vocabulary but loses instruction-following ability. SFT is essential to recover and improve task performance.

Training Details

Hardware

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 (8GB VRAM)
• Training Time: ~24 hours total (17h CPT + 7h SFT)
• Framework: PyTorch + Transformers + PEFT + TRL

Quantization (QLoRA)

BitsAndBytesConfig(
    load_in_4bit=True,
    bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4",        # NormalFloat4 quantization
    bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=bfloat16,  # Compute precision
)

Memory Usage: ~3-4GB VRAM during training (vs 6+ GB for full fine-tuning)

LoRA Configuration

LoraConfig(
    r=16,                              # Rank of adapter matrices
    lora_alpha=32,                     # Scaling factor (α/r = 2)
    lora_dropout=0.05,                 # Regularization
    target_modules=[                   # Applied to attention layers
        "q_proj", "k_proj", 
        "v_proj", "o_proj"
    ],
    task_type="CAUSAL_LM",
)

Trainable Parameters: 2.16M (0.44% of 496M total)

CPT Hyperparameters

SFT Hyperparameters

Data

CPT Data (Domain Adaptation):

• Source: scientific_papers dataset (arXiv subset)
• Size: 50,000 abstracts
• Processing: Minimal cleaning, kept @xmath/@xcite tokens
• Average length: 1,597 characters

SFT Data (Task Training):

• Source: allenai/scitldr (Abstract configuration)
• Size: 1,992 training examples
• Format: Chat messages (system/user/assistant)
• Average abstract: 1,121 chars → Average TL;DR: 137 chars

Usage

Installation

pip install transformers peft bitsandbytes accelerate torch

Loading the Model

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer, BitsAndBytesConfig
from peft import PeftModel

# Quantization config
bnb_config = BitsAndBytesConfig(
    load_in_4bit=True,
    bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4",
    bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
)

# Load base model
base_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct",
    quantization_config=bnb_config,
    device_map="auto",
)

# Load adapter
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(
    base_model, 
    "tcy93/scitldr-qwen2.5-0.5b-summarizer"
)
model.eval()

# Load tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct")

Generating Summaries

def summarize(abstract: str) -> str:
    messages = [
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a scientific paper summarizer. Provide a one-sentence summary (TL;DR) of the given abstract."},
        {"role": "user", "content": f"Summarize this abstract:\n\n{abstract}"},
    ]
    
    text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
        messages, 
        tokenize=False, 
        add_generation_prompt=True
    )
    inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
    
    with torch.no_grad():
        outputs = model.generate(
            **inputs,
            max_new_tokens=100,
            do_sample=False,
        )
    
    response = tokenizer.decode(
        outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], 
        skip_special_tokens=True
    )
    return response.strip()

# Example
abstract = """
We propose a new optimization algorithm called AdamW that decouples 
weight decay from the gradient update. This simple modification leads 
to better generalization performance compared to L2 regularization in Adam.
"""

print(summarize(abstract))
# Output: "We propose AdamW, an optimizer that decouples weight decay from gradient updates for improved generalization."

Example Outputs

Limitations

• Domain: Optimized for scientific/academic abstracts (computer science, physics, etc.)
• Language: English only
• Output: Single-sentence summaries only (by design)
• Model Size: 0.5B parameters limits complex reasoning compared to larger models
• Generalization: May not perform well on non-scientific text (news, social media, etc.)

Ethical Considerations

• This model generates summaries and may occasionally produce inaccurate or misleading content
• Always verify important claims against the original source
• Not intended for generating fake scientific content

Citation

@misc{scitldr-qwen-summarizer-2025,
  author = {Turgut Cem Yilmazturk},
  title = {Scientific Paper Summarizer: Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-0.5B on SciTLDR},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/tcy93/scitldr-qwen2.5-0.5b-summarizer}}
}

Acknowledgments

• Base Model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct
• SFT Dataset: SciTLDR by AllenAI
• CPT Dataset: scientific_papers (arXiv)
• Benchmark: TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents (EMNLP 2020)

License

Apache 2.0 (following the base model license)