This report synthesises findings from 11 peer-reviewed papers addressing the following research question: How does domain-specific fine-tuning of 3B-parameter models affect exact match accuracy on HotpotQA when integrated with retrieval augmentation compared to zero-shot baselines. 9 claims were extracted from source literature; 9 were independently verified against retrieved documents. An automated multi-reviewer quality assessment produced a score of 8.5/10. This report is a machine-generated literature synthesis and does not constitute original research.Research goal: How does domain-specific fine-tuning of 3B-parameter models affect exact match accuracy on HotpotQA when integrated with retrieval augmentation compared to zero-shot baselines?Autonomous literature synthesis. Automated review score: 8.5/10. Full text and citation available at Assignee Research.