A Training-Free Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Multi-Document Summarization using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Cuong Vuong Tuan, Trang Mai Xuan, Tien-Cuong Nguyen, Vu-Duc Ngo, Thien Van Luong
Abstract
Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) plays a critical role in distilling essential information from collections of textual data. Existing approaches often struggle to capture complex inter-document relationships, rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for supervised training, or exhibit limited generalization across domains and languages. To address these limitations, we present a training-free mixture-of-agents framework for MDS that leverages the complementary strengths of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Our approach decomposes summarization into specialized agent tasks: extractive selection, knowledge-aware abstraction, and iterative refinement, each operating without task-specific fine-tuning. We unify their outputs using a multi-perspective consistency mechanism guided by LLMs. Experiments across four datasets in English and Vietnamese demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of our modular design.
Multimodal long documents are core carriers of professional knowledge, where critical evidence is sparsely distributed across paragraphs and modalities. This easily causes key information omission and cross-modal hallucinations in summarization by multimodal LLMs. These issues stem from attention drift in long-range dependency modeling and gaps in inter-modal alignment. To address this, we introduce MMLDSum-Bench, a high-quality benchmark for multimodal long-document summarization, covering multiple domains, context-length scales, and visual-textual modality distributions. We further propose MMLDSum-LLM, a reproducible two-stage training framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with visual-alignment weighted loss and keyword-aware weighted loss, followed by GRPO with a multi-objective reward (keyword coverage, image-text alignment, ROUGE, and length control). Extensive experiments on MMLDSum-Bench, comparing against leading closed-source and open-source multimodal models under a unified evaluation protocol - including LLM-as-a-judge scoring, atomic-claim precision/recall, image-text alignment (ITA), and ROUGE - demonstrate that our approach significantly improves key-information coverage and cross-modal consistency.
Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential in news summarization tasks, their performance on long-document summarization remains challenging as their length often exceeds the input limits. As the agent investment, which provide possibility to improve the inherent capabilities of LLMs. To enhance the effectiveness of long-document summarization based on LLMs, this paper proposes an expert-editor stepwise questioning multi-agent method, in which the expert and the editor guide another agent to refine the summary by posing questions on different aspects of the content and providing targeted clues for revision. We conducted experiments on two representative long-document scientific datasets and evaluated the results through widely recognized automatic metrics. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.
Text summarization is deceptively difficult. While condensing information seems straightforward, real-world enterprise summarization of support tickets, legal documents, incident reports, and more, demands strict adherence to domain-specific guidelines, output formats, and organizational conventions. Crafting prompts that reliably satisfy these constraints is labor-intensive, requiring significant human expertise and continuous maintenance as requirements evolve. Existing automated prompt optimization methods reduce this burden through Large Language Model (LLM) critique-driven refinement, yet remain limited by static prompts that cannot adapt to the diversity of summary applications. We propose Multi-LLM Iterative Data-Adaptive Summarization (MIDAS), a multi-LLM framework that extends this paradigm with data-driven pattern learning and use-case-specific personalization, enabling automatic adaptation to different summarization requirements without manual prompt engineering. Applied to enterprise customer ticket summarization across five output formats, MIDAS achieves the strongest overall performance against state-of-the-art critique-driven optimization frameworks such as CriSPO and ZERA, improving ROUGE-1 by up to 11.0%, ROUGE-2 by up to 18.2%, and ROUGE-L by up to 8.0%, while consistently improving BERTScore F1 across all formats and output types. We additionally demonstrate cross-model and cross-domain generalization through multi-LLM configurations and finance-domain summarization benchmarks.