Summarization

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14 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Summarization.

Period ending 2026-09-14

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Summarization.

Period ending 2026-09-07

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Summarization.

182 papers

Latest in Summarization

May 14, 2026cs.AI

COREKG: Coreset-Guided Personalized Summarization of Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are extensively used across different domains and in several applications. Often, these KGs are very large in size. Such KGs become unwieldy for tasks such as question answering and visualization. Summarization of KGs offers a viable alternative in such cases. Furthermore, personalized KG summarization is crucial in the current data-driven world as it captures the specific requirements of users based on their query patterns. Since it only maintains relevant information, the personalized summaries of KG are small, resulting in significantly smaller storage requirements and query runtime. In this work, we adapt the coreset theory to create personalized KG summaries. For a given dataset and a user-specific query workload, we present an approach that samples a relevant subset of triples using sensitivity-based importance sampling. We ensure that the subset approximates the characteristics of the full dataset with bounded approximation error. We define sensitivity scores that measure the importance of a triple with respect to a user's query workload, which are then used by our coreset construction algorithm. We explicitly focus on personalized knowledge graph summarization by constructing summaries independently for each user based on their query behaviour. Our evaluation on Freebase, WikiData, and DBpedia shows that COREKG delivers higher query-answering accuracy and structural coverage than the state-of-the-art methods, such as GLIMPSE, PPR, iSummary, PEGASUS and APEX2^2 while requiring only a tiny fraction of the original graph.
Sohel Aman Khan, Raghava Mutharaju, Supratim Shit
May 13, 2026cs.CL

BOOKMARKS: Efficient Active Storyline Memory for Role-playing

Memory systems are critical for role-playing agents (RPAs) to maintain long-horizon consistency. However, existing RPA memory methods (e.g., profiling) mainly rely on recurrent summarization, whose compression inevitably discards important details. To address this issue, we propose a search-based memory framework called BOOKMARKS, which actively initializes, maintains, and updates task-relevant pieces of bookmarks for the current task (e.g., character acting). A bookmark is structured as the answer to a question at a specific point in the storyline. For each current task, BOOKMARKS selects reusable existing bookmarks or initializes new ones (at storyline beginning) with useful questions. These bookmarks are then synchronized to the current story point, with their answers updated accordingly, so they can be efficiently reused in future grounding rounds. Compared with recurrent summarization, BOOKMARKS offers (1) active grounding for capturing task-specific details and (2) passive updating to avoid unnecessary computation. In implementation, BOOKMARKS supports concept, behavior, and state searches, each powered by an efficient synchronization method. BOOKMARKS significantly outperforms RPA memory baselines on 85 characters from 16 artifacts, demonstrating the effectiveness of search-based memory for RPAs.
Letian Peng, Ziche Liu, Yiming Huang +4
May 13, 2026cs.LG

INSIGHTS: Demonstration-Based Summaries of Time Series Predictors

Explainability methods have progressed rapidly, but global explanations for time-series models remain underdeveloped, with most approaches focusing on local, instance-level attributions. We introduce INSIGHTS, a model-agnostic, user-centric approach for providing global explanations of time series models. Our approach prioritizes simplicity, efficiency, and transparency in its design, ensuring that stakeholders can readily adopt its outputs. While current methods focus on local explanations, INSIGHTS generates sample summaries that offer a comprehensive overview of model behavior. It balances the importance and diversity of time series samples to create informative subsets using utility functions that capture domain-specific aspects of time series behavior, such as exceeding domain norms. We evaluate INSIGHTS through experiments, interviews, and a user study. Our results indicate INSIGHTS effectively constructs comprehensive, diverse time series subsets, producing summaries manageable for individual evaluation. It is preferred by domain experts for its ability to provide a stable understanding of model behavior and the quality of the samples identified. Moreover, user study participants presented with INSIGHTS-based summaries exhibit an enhanced understanding of the model's overall behavior.
Bar Eini Porat, Rom Gutman, Uri Shalit +1
May 12, 2026cs.CL

Towards Visually-Guided Movie Subtitle Translation for Indic Languages

Movie subtitle translation is inherently multimodal, yet text-only systems often miss visual cues needed to convey emotion, action, and social nuance, especially for low-resource Indic languages (English to Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada). We present a case study on five full-length films and compare two lightweight visual grounding strategies: structured attribute summaries from a 5-minute sliding window and free-text summaries of inter-subtitle visual gaps. Our analysis shows that temporal misalignment between subtitles and frames is a major obstacle in long-form video, often rendering indiscriminate visual grounding ineffective. However, oracle selective grounding, which replaces only the lowest-quality 20-30% of baseline segments with visual-enhanced outputs, consistently improves COMET over the text-only baseline while requiring far less visual processing. Among the two approaches, coarse attribute-based visual context summarization is more robust, capturing scene-level emotion and contextual subtle cues that text alone often misses
Tarun Chintada, Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh, Asif Ekbal
May 12, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Abstractive Summarization of Instructional Videos with Vision-Language Models

Multimodal video summarization requires visual features that align semantically with language generation. Traditional approaches rely on CNN features trained for object classification, which represent visual concepts as discrete categories not aligned with natural language. We propose ClipSum, a framework that leverages frozen CLIP vision-language features with explicit temporal modeling and dimension-adaptive fusion for instructional video summarization. CLIP's contrastive pre-training on 400M image-text pairs yields visual features semantically aligned with the linguistic concepts that text decoders generate, bridging the vision-language gap at the representation level. On YouCook2, ClipSum achieves 33.0% ROUGE-1 versus 30.5% for ResNet-152 with 4x lower dimensionality (512 vs. 2048), demonstrating that semantic alignment matters more than feature capacity. Frozen CLIP (33.0%) surpasses fine-tuned CLIP (32.3%), showing that preserving pre-trained alignment is more valuable than task-specific adaptation. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/clipsum
Maham Nazir, Muhammad Aqeel, Richong Zhang +1
May 12, 2026cs.AI

Towards Visually Grounded Multimodal Summarization via Cross-Modal Transformer and Gated Attention

Multimodal summarization requires models to jointly understand textual and visual inputs to generate concise, semantically coherent summaries. Existing methods often inject shallow visual features into deep language models, leading to representational mismatches and weak cross-modal grounding. We propose a unified framework that jointly performs text summarization and representative image selection. Our system, SPeCTrA-Sum (Sampler Perceiver with Cross-modal Transformer and gated Attention for Summarization), introduces two key innovations. First, a Deep Visual Processor (DVP) aligns the visual encoder with the language model at corresponding depths, enabling hierarchical, layer-wise fusion that preserves semantic consistency. Second, a lightweight Visual Relevance Predictor (VRP) selects salient and diverse images by distilling soft labels from a Determinantal Point Processes (DPP) teacher. SPeCTrA-Sum is trained using a multi-objective loss that combines autoregressive summarization, cross-modal alignment, and DPP-based distillation. Experiments show that our system produces more accurate, visually grounded summaries and selects more representative images, demonstrating the benefits of depth-aware fusion and principled image selection for multimodal summarization.
Abid Ali, Diego Molla-Aliod, Usman Naseem
May 12, 2026cs.AI

Measuring What Matters Beyond Text: Evaluating Multimodal Summaries by Quality, Alignment, and Diversity

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have facilitated Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (MSMO), wherein systems generate concise textual summaries accompanied by salient visuals from multimodal sources. However, current MSMO evaluation remains fragmented: text quality, image-text alignment, and visual diversity are typically assessed in isolation using unimodal metrics, making it difficult to capture whether the modalities jointly support a faithful and useful summary. To address this gap, we introduce MM-Eval, a unified evaluation framework that integrates assessments of textual quality, cross-modal alignment, and visual diversity. MM-Eval comprises three components: (1) text quality, measured using OpenFActScore for factual consistency and G-Eval for coherence, fluency, and relevance; (2) image-text relevance, evaluated via an MLLM-as-a-judge approach; and (3) image-set diversity, quantified using Truncated CLIP Entropy. We calibrate MM-Eval through a learned aggregation model trained on the mLLM-EVAL news benchmark, aligning component contributions with human preferences. Our analysis reveals a text-dominant hierarchy in this setting, where factual consistency acts as a critical determinant of perceived overall quality, while visual relevance and diversity provide complementary signals. MM-Eval improves over heuristic aggregation baselines and provides an interpretable, reference-weak framework for comparative evaluation of multimodal summaries.
Abid Ali, Diego Molla-Aliod, Usman Naseem
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Self-Attention as a Covariance Readout: A Unified View of In-Context Learning and Repetition

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit two striking and ostensibly unrelated behaviours: in-context learning (ICL) and repetitive generation. In both, the model behaves as though it had summarised the context into a population-level statistic and discarded token-level detail. We ask whether this ``summarisation and forgetting'' can be derived from the attention mechanism itself, and answer in the affirmative. Under stationary, ergodic and elliptical inputs, the softmax attention output converges almost surely to ΘVΣΘKΘQxtΘ_VΣΘ_K^{\top}Θ_Q x_t, where ΣΣ is the input covariance; the long-context limit is therefore a linear readout of the input's second-order statistics. Two consequences follow. (i) For in-context linear regression, a single softmax head can implement one step of population gradient descent. Stacking such heads with residual connections iterates this update and implements multiple gradient descent steps. (ii) Propagated across an LL-layer transformer, this readout drives the terminal hidden state at the parametric 1/t1/t rate to a deterministic function of the current token alone, so that autoregressive generation collapses asymptotically to a first-order Markov chain whose attracting orbits furnish a structural account of repetition and mode collapse. The two phenomena thus emerge as facets of a single covariance-readout principle.
Haoren Xu, Guanhua Fang
May 10, 2026cs.CV

Uncertainty-Aware and Decoder-Aligned Learning for Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to produce a compact representation of a long video by selecting a subset of temporally important segments that best reflect human preferences. This task is inherently difficult due to strong annotation subjectivity and the reliance on discrete decoding procedures, such as temporal segmentation and knapsack-based selection, during evaluation. Most existing approaches either learn deterministic importance scores that overlook these characteristics or adopt complex generative models that increase training and inference cost. In this paper, we propose VASTSum, an uncertainty-aware and decoder-aligned learning framework for video summarization that addresses both challenges within a single-pass model. The proposed method predicts probabilistic frame-level importance scores using a variational formulation, enabling explicit modeling of uncertainty arising from multi-annotator supervision. To account for subjectivity, particularly under binary annotations, we employ a supervision strategy that encourages alignment with plausible human annotation modes rather than enforcing a single consensus target. Furthermore, we introduce a decoder-aligned regularization that promotes stability of knapsack-based summary selection, reducing sensitivity to small perturbations in predicted scores. We evaluate the proposed framework on the SumMe and TVSum benchmarks using standard rank-based metrics. Experimental results show consistent and competitive Kendall and Spearman correlations across multiple data splits, demonstrating improved robustness under annotation disagreement while maintaining efficient single-forward inference. These results indicate that explicitly modeling uncertainty and aligning learning objectives with the decoding stage provide a principled alternative to both deterministic and diffusion-based video summarization methods.
Omer Tariq, Syed Muhammad Raza, Jeongbae Son
May 8, 2026cs.LG

Optimal Recourse Summaries via Bi-Objective Decision Tree Learning

Actionable Recourse provides individuals with actions they can take to change an unfavorable classifier outcome. While useful at the instance level, it is ill-suited for global auditing and bias detection, since aggregating local actions is costly and often inconsistent. Recourse Summaries address this limitation by partitioning the population and assigning one shared action per subgroup, enabling comparison across subgroups. Designing summaries involves a fundamental trade-off between recourse effectiveness and recourse cost, which existing methods do not adequately address. We introduce Summaries of Optimal and Global Actionable Recourse (SOGAR), which formulates recourse summary learning as an optimal decision tree learning problem and finds the Pareto front -- the complete set of solutions where improving one objective necessarily worsens the other. SOGAR enables post-hoc selection of the desired trade-off without retraining. Using shallow axis-parallel decision trees and sparse leaf actions, SOGAR produces stable, low-cost, and effective recourse summaries that outperform existing approaches across effectiveness and cost metrics.
Ioannis Chatzis, Jason Liartis, Athanasios Voulodimos +1
May 7, 2026cs.AI

PREFER: Personalized Review Summarization with Online Preference Learning

Product reviews significantly influence purchasing decisions on e-commerce platforms. However, the sheer volume of reviews can overwhelm users, obscuring the information most relevant to their specific needs. Current e-commerce summarization systems typically produce generic, static summaries that fail to account for the fact that (i) different users care about different product characteristics, and (ii) these preferences may evolve with interactions. To address the challenge of unknown latent preferences, we propose an online learning framework that generates personalized summaries for each user. Our system iteratively refines its understanding of user preferences by incorporating feedback directly from the generated summaries over time. We provide a case study using the Amazon Reviews'23 dataset, showing in controlled simulations that online preference learning improves alignment with target user interests while maintaining summary quality.
Millend Roy, Agostino Capponi, Vineet Goyal
May 6, 2026cs.CL

Generating Query-Focused Summarization Datasets from Query-Free Summarization Datasets

Large-scale datasets are widely used to perform summarization tasks, but they may not include queries alongside documents and summaries. In the search for suitable datasets for Query-Focused Summarization (QFS), we identify two research questions: Is it possible to automatically generate evidence-based query keywords from query-free datasets? Does evidence-based query generation support the QFS task? This paper proposes an evidence-based model to generate queries from query-free datasets. To evaluate our model intrinsically, we compare the similarity between the original queries and the system-generated queries of two QFS datasets. We also perform summarization tasks using different pre-trained models, as well as a state-of-the-art (SOTA) QFS model, to measure the extrinsic performance of our query generation approach. Experimental results indicate that summaries generated using evidence-based queries achieve competitive ROUGE scores compared to those generated from the original queries.
Yllias Chali, Deen Abdullah
May 5, 2026cs.CL

TriBench-Ko: Evaluating LLM Risks in Judicial Workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into legal workflows. However, existing benchmarks primarily address proxy tasks, such as bar examination performance or classification, which fail to capture the performance and risks inherent in day-to-day judicial processes. To address this, we publicly release TriBench-Ko, a Korean benchmark designed to evaluate potential deployment risks of LLMs within the context of verified judicial task requirements. It covers four core tasks: jurisprudence summarization, precedent retrieval, legal issue extraction, and evidence analysis. It jointly assesses model behavior across multiple deployment risk categories, including inaccuracy (hallucination, omission, statutory misapplication), biases (demographic, overcompliance), inconsistencies (prompt sensitivity, non-determinism), and adjudicative overreach. Each item is structured to systematically assess both task performance and a specific risk type based on real judicial decisions. Our evaluation of a range of contemporary LLMs reveals that many models frequently manifest significant risks, most notably struggling with precedent retrieval and failing to capture critical legal information. We provide a comprehensive diagnosis of these LLMs and pinpoint critical areas where LLM-generated outputs in judicial contexts necessitate rigorous inspection and caution. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/holi-lab/TriBench-Ko
Haesung Lee, Gyubin Choi, Eun-Ju Lee +5
May 5, 2026cs.CL

S^2tory: Story Spine Distillation for Movie Script Summarization

Movie scripts pose a fundamental challenge for automatic summarization due to their non-linear, cross-cut narrative structure, which makes surface-level saliency methods ineffective at preserving core story progression. To address this, we introduce S^2tory (Story Spine Distillation), a narratology-grounded framework that leverages character development trajectories to identify plot nuclei, the essential events that drive the narrative forward, while filtering out peripheral satellite events that merely enrich atmosphere or emotion. Our Narrative Expert Agent (NEAgent) performs theory-constrained reasoning, whose distilled knowledge conditions a small model to identify plot nuclei. Another model then uses these plot nuclei to generate the summary. Experiments on the MovieSum dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art semantic fidelity at approximately 3.5x compression, and zero-shot evaluation on BookSum confirms strong out-of-domain generalization. Human evaluation further validates that narratological theory provides an indispensable foundation for modeling complex, non-linear narratives.
Mingzhe Lu, Yanbing Liu, Qihao Wang +5
May 3, 2026cs.CL

GRAVITY: Architecture-Agnostic Structured Anchoring for Long-Horizon Conversational Memory

Long-horizon conversational agents rely on memory systems with increasingly sophisticated retrieval mechanisms. However, retrieved fragments are typically fed to the language model as unstructured text, lacking the relational, temporal, and thematic structures essential for complex reasoning. To bridge this reasoning gap, we introduce GRAVITY (\textbf{G}eneration-time \textbf{R}elational \textbf{A}nchoring \textbf{V}ia \textbf{I}njected \textbf{T}opological Memor\textbf{Y}), a plug-and-play structured memory module. GRAVITY extracts three complementary knowledge representations from raw conversational utterances: entity profiles grounded in relational graphs, temporal event tuples linked into causal traces, and cross-session topic summaries. At generation time, it injects these representations into the host system's prompt as structured anchoring contexts. This approach effectively synthesizes scattered evidence into a coherent, query-relevant context without requiring any architectural modifications to the host model. Extensive evaluations across five diverse memory systems on the LongMemEval and LoCoMo benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. On average, GRAVITY improves LLM-judge accuracy by 7.5--10.1%. Gains are inversely correlated with baseline strength: the weakest host improves by 12.2% while the strongest still gains 3.8--5.7%. These findings establish structured context anchoring as a broadly effective, architecture-agnostic augmentation paradigm for long-horizon conversational memory.
Yushi Sun, Bowen Cao, Dong Fang +2
May 3, 2026cs.CV

TRIMMER: A New Paradigm for Video Summarization through Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning

The rapid growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and social media has made efficient content understanding increasingly critical. Video summarization addresses this challenge by generating concise yet semantically meaningful representations, but existing approaches often rely on expensive manual annotations, struggle to generalize across domains, and incur significant computational costs due to complex architectures. Moreover, unsupervised and weakly supervised methods typically underperform compared to supervised counterparts in capturing long-range temporal dependencies and semantic structure. In this work, we propose TRIMMER (Temporal Relative Information Maximization for Multi-objective Efficient Reinforcement), a novel self-supervised reinforcement learning framework for video summarization. TRIMMER operates in two stages: it first learns robust representations via self-supervised learning and then performs spatio-temporal decision making through reinforcement learning guided by information-theoretic reward functions. Unlike prior approaches that rely on similarity-based objectives, our method introduces entropy-based metrics to capture higher-order temporal dynamics and semantic diversity, while computing rewards directly over selected frame indices to improve computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TRIMMER achieves state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised and self-supervised methods, while remaining competitive with leading supervised approaches, highlighting its effectiveness for scalable and generalizable video summarization.
Pritam Mishra, Coloma Ballester, Dimosthenis Karatzas
May 2, 2026cs.CV

SF20K Competition 2025: Summary and findings

This report presents the results and findings of the first edition of the Short-Films 20K (SF20K) Competition, held in conjunction with the SLoMO Workshop at ICCV 2025. The competition is designed to advance story-level video understanding beyond short-clip action recognition, introducing an open-ended video question-answering task built on a corpus of amateur short films. This setup ensures that models must rely on multimodal understanding rather than memorization of popular movies. Evaluation is conducted using the SF20K-Test benchmark (95 movies, 979 question-answer pairs) and scored via LLM-QA-Eval, an automated judge based on GPT-4.1-nano. The competition attracted 22 teams and 286 submissions across two tracks: a Main Track with unrestricted model size and a Special Track limited to models under 8 billion parameters. The winning team achieved 65.7% accuracy on the Main Track and 48.7% on the Special Track, against a human performance ceiling of 91.7%. Our analysis reveals several key findings: narrative-aware, shot-level processing consistently outperforms uniform frame sampling; well-designed multi-stage pipelines using smaller models can match or exceed end-to-end inference with models over 30x larger; and subtitle quality is a dominant factor in performance. These results highlight that the primary bottleneck in long-form video QA lies in information selection and reasoning structure rather than raw model capacity, and that a substantial gap remains between current methods and human-level narrative comprehension.
Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton +1
May 1, 2026cs.LG

Hierarchical Abstract Tree for Cross-Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models with external knowledge, and tree-based RAG organizes documents into hierarchical indexes to support queries at multiple granularities. However, existing Tree-RAG methods designed for single-document retrieval face critical challenges in scaling to cross-document multi-hop questions: (1) poor distribution adaptability, where kk-means clustering introduces noise due to rigid distribution assumptions; (2) structural isolation, as tree indexes lack explicit cross-document connections; and (3) coarse abstraction, which obscures fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose ΨΨ-RAG, a tree-RAG framework with two key components. First, a hierarchical abstract tree index built through an iterative "merging and collapse" process that adapts to data distributions without a priori assumption. Second, a multi-granular retrieval agent that intelligently interacts with the knowledge base with reorganized queries and an agent-powered hybrid retriever. ΨΨ-RAG supports diverse tasks from token-level question answering to document-level summarization. On cross-document multi-hop QA benchmarks, it outperforms RAPTOR by 25.9% and HippoRAG 2 by 7.4% in average F1 score. Code is available at https://github.com/Newiz430/Psi-RAG.
Ziwen Zhao, Menglin Yang
May 1, 2026cs.CL

ReLay: Personalized LLM-Generated Plain-Language Summaries for Better Understanding, but at What Cost?

Plain Language Summaries (PLS) aim to make research accessible to lay readers, but they are typically written in a one-size-fits-all style that ignores differences in readers' information needs and comprehension. In health contexts, this limitation is particularly important because misunderstanding scientific information can affect real-world decisions. Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for personalizing PLS, but it remains unclear whether personalization helps, which strategies are most effective, and how to balance personalization with safety. We introduce ReLay, a dataset of 300 participant--PLS pairs from 50 lay participants in both static (expert-written) and interactive (LLM-personalized) settings. ReLay includes user characteristics, health information needs, information-seeking behavior, comprehension outcomes, interaction logs, and quality ratings. We use ReLay to evaluate five LLMs across two personalization methods. Personalization improves comprehension and perceived quality, but it also raises the risk of reinforcing user biases and introducing hallucinations, revealing a trade-off between personalization and safety. These findings highlight the need for personalization methods that are both effective and trustworthy for diverse lay audiences.
Joey Chan, Yikun Han, Jingyuan Chen +8
Apr 30, 2026cs.CL

Lost in State Space: Probing Frozen Mamba Representations

Mamba's recurrent state h_t is, by construction, a compressed summary of every token seen so far. This raises a tempting hypothesis: if we extract token-level outputs y_t at fixed patch boundaries, we obtain semantic sentence summaries for free, with no pooling head, no fine-tuning, and no [CLS] token. We test this hypothesis carefully. Across five benchmarks (SST-2, CoLA, MRPC, STS-B, IMDb), we compare four strategies for extracting frozen sentence representations from a pretrained Mamba-130M backbone under a strict frozen-feature probing protocol, using three random seeds where computationally feasible. The results do not support the hypothesis: patch boundary readouts do not consistently outperform simple mean pooling. We identify and quantify two structural pathologies: severe anisotropy (mean pairwise cosine similarity 0.9999, std 0.000044) and representational collapse in the raw final SSM state (MCC = 0.000 on CoLA across all three seeds, confirmed via confusion matrix). We further propose orthogonal injection, a modified recurrence that constrains new information per
Bhagyashree Wagh, Akash Singh
Apr 30, 2026cs.CL

APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation

Privacy policies are essential for users to understand how service providers handle their personal data. However, these documents are often long and complex, as well as filled with technobabble and legalese, causing users to unknowingly accept terms that may even contradict the law. While summarizing and interpreting these privacy policies is crucial, there is a lack of high-quality English parallel corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability. To address this issue, we introduce APPSI-139, a high-quality English privacy policy corpus meticulously annotated by domain experts, specifically designed for summarization and interpretation tasks. The corpus includes 139 English privacy policies, 15,692 rewritten parallel corpora, and 36,351 fine-grained annotation labels across 11 data practice categories. Concurrently, we propose TCSI-pp-V2, a hybrid privacy policy summarization and interpretation framework that employs an alternating training strategy and coordinates multiple expert modules to effectively balance computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that the hybrid summarization system built on APPSI-139 corpus and the TCSI-pp-V2 framework outperform large language models, such as GPT-4o and LLaMA-3-70B, in terms of readability and reliability. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/APPSI-139.
Pengyun Zhu, Qiheng Sun, Long Wen +7
Apr 28, 2026cs.CL

LLM-ReSum: A Framework for LLM Reflective Summarization through Self-Evaluation

Reliable evaluation of large language model (LLM)-generated summaries remains an open challenge, particularly across heterogeneous domains and document lengths. We conduct a comprehensive meta-evaluation of 14 automatic summarization metrics and LLM-based evaluators across seven datasets spanning five domains, covering documents from short news articles to long scientific, governmental, and legal texts (2K-27K words) with over 1,500 human-annotated summaries. Our results show that traditional lexical overlap metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BLEU) exhibit weak or negative correlation with human judgments, while task-specific neural metrics and LLM-based evaluators achieve substantially higher alignment, especially for linguistic quality assessment. Leveraging these findings, we propose LLM-ReSum, a self-reflective summarization framework that integrates LLM-based evaluation and generation in a closed feedback loop without model finetuning. Across three domains, LLM-ReSum improves low-quality summaries by up to 33% in factual accuracy and 39% in coverage, with human evaluators preferring refined summaries in 89% of cases. We additionally introduce PatentSumEval, a new human-annotated benchmark for legal document summarization comprising 180 expert-evaluated summaries. All code and datasets will be released in GitHub.
Huyen Nguyen, Haoxuan Zhang, Yang Zhang +2
Apr 28, 2026cs.CL

LongSumEval: Question-Answering Based Evaluation and Feedback-Driven Refinement for Long Document Summarization

Evaluating long document summaries remains the primary bottleneck in summarization research. Existing metrics correlate weakly with human judgments and produce aggregate scores without explaining deficiencies or guiding improvement, preventing effective refinement in applications requiring verifiable accuracy. We introduce LongSumEval, a unified framework bridging evaluation and generation through structured question-answering feedback. The framework operationalizes summary quality as answerability and factual alignment of question-answer pairs, generating interpretable scores and actionable feedback that identifies coverage gaps and factual inconsistencies. This resolves the misalignment where evaluation operates independently of generation objectives. Meta-evaluation of our QA-based evaluation module across seven benchmarks demonstrates substantially stronger agreement with human judgments compared to established metrics. Structured feedback enables significant quality improvements through self-refinement without retraining. By demonstrating that evaluation feedback can serve as executable instructions for generation, this work establishes a generalizable paradigm for aligning assessment with improvement, with direct implications for controllable text generation requiring verifiable accuracy and transparent quality control. All code and datasets will be released in GitHub for reproducibility.
Huyen Nguyen, Haoxuan Zhang, Yang Zhang +2
Apr 27, 2026cs.CV

QEVA: A Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Narrative Video Summarization with Multimodal Question Answering

Video-to-text summarization remains underexplored in terms of comprehensive evaluation methods. Traditional n-gram overlap-based metrics and recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches depend heavily on human-written reference summaries, limiting their practicality and sensitivity to nuanced semantic aspects. In this paper, we propose QEVA, a reference-free metric evaluating candidate summaries directly against source videos through multimodal question answering. QEVA assesses summaries along three clear dimensions: Coverage, Factuality, and Chronology. We also introduce MLVU(VS)-Eval, a new annotated benchmark derived from the MLVU dataset, comprising 800 summaries generated from 200 videos using state-of-the-art video-language multimodal models. This dataset establishes a transparent and consistent framework for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that QEVA shows higher correlation with human judgments compared to existing approaches, as measured by Kendall's τbτ_b, τcτ_c, and Spearman's ρρ. We hope that our benchmark and metric will facilitate meaningful progress in video-to-text summarization research and provide valuable insights for the development of future evaluation methods.
Woojun Jung, Junyeong Kim
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

ContextWeaver: Selective and Dependency-Structured Memory Construction for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents often struggle in long-context interactions. As the agent accumulates more interaction history, context management approaches such as sliding window and prompt compression may omit earlier structured information that later steps rely on. Recent retrieval-based memory systems surface relevant content but still overlook the causal and logical structure needed for multi-step reasoning. We introduce ContextWeaver, a selective and dependency-structured memory framework that organizes an agent's interaction trace into a graph of reasoning steps and selects the relevant context for future actions. Unlike prior context management approaches, ContextWeaver supports: (1) dependency-based construction and traversal that link each step to the earlier steps it relies on; (2) compact dependency summarization that condenses root-to-step reasoning paths into reusable units; and (3) a lightweight validation layer that incorporates execution feedback. On the SWE-Bench Verified and Lite benchmarks, ContextWeaver improves performance over a sliding-window baseline in pass@1, while reducing reasoning steps and token usage. Our observations suggest that modeling logical dependencies provides a stable and scalable memory mechanism for LLM agents that use tools.
Yating Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Sayan Ghosh +4
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

SLIDERS: Systematic Reviews via Automated Evidence Synthesis and Reconciliation

Systematic reviews -- which requires comprehensive evidence collection and synthesis from large document corpora in response to targeted research questions -- are foundational in finance, social sciences, and other technical fields. Manual construction of evidence tables is labor-intensive, and recent LLM-based assistants relying on embedding or keyword based search often fail to meet the coverage standards of systematic reviews. We introduce SLIDERS, a novel LLM-based methodology for systematic reviews, by automatically assembling evidence tables tailored to research questions. In addition to extracting structured data from documents, SLIDERS can extract full-text excerpts that serve as direct evidence or as provenance for structured data. Core to SLIDERS is an automated evidence reconciliation agent that writes code to analyze and reconcile extracted evidence, bringing together information fragmented across documents, resolving inconsistencies across excerpts, and synthesizing overlapping findings into a coherent evidence table. In addition, SLIDERS allows users to ask follow-up questions in natural language to further explore the assembled evidence. We evaluate SLIDERS on three systematic-review-style tasks over large document collections. SLIDERS outperforms the best-performing baseline across benchmarks, remains near 90% accuracy across 6M-11M-token corpora. On two new follow-up analysis benchmarks SLIDERS can answer 77.9% and 58.3% followup questions accurately
Harshit Joshi, Priyank Shethia, Jadelynn Dao +1
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

ReLeVAnT: Relevance Lexical Vectors for Accurate Legal Text Classification

The classification of legal documents from an unstructured data corpus has several crucial applications in downstream tasks. Documents relevant to court filings are key in use cases such as drafting motions, memos, and outlines, as well as in tasks like docket summarisation, retrieval systems, and training data curation. Current methods classify based on provided metadata, LLM-extracted metadata, or multimodal methods. These methods depend on structured data, metadata, and extensive computational power. This task is approached from a perspective of leveraging discriminative features in the documents between classes. The authors propose ReLeVAnT, a framework for legal document binary classification. ReLeVAnT utilises n-gram processing, contrastive score matching, and a shallow neural network as the primary drivers for discriminative classification. It leverages one-time keyword extraction per corpus, followed by a shallow classifier to swiftly and reliably classify documents with 99.3% accuracy and 98.7% F1 score on the LexGLUE dataset.
Ishaan Gakhar, Harsh Nandwani
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

Bridging the Long-Tail Gap: Robust Retrieval-Augmented Relation Completion via Multi-Stage Paraphrase Infusion

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with relation completion (RC), both with and without retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), particularly when the required information is rare or sparsely represented. To address this, we propose a novel multi-stage paraphrase-guided relation-completion framework, RC-RAG, that systematically incorporates relation paraphrases across multiple stages. In particular, RC-RAG: (a) integrates paraphrases into retrieval to expand lexical coverage of the relation, (b) uses paraphrases to generate relation-aware summaries, and (c) leverages paraphrases during generation to guide reasoning for relation completion. Importantly, our method does not require any model fine-tuning. Experiments with five LLMs on two benchmark datasets show that RC-RAG consistently outperforms several RAG baselines. In long-tail settings, the best-performing LLM augmented with RC-RAG improves by 40.6 Exact Match (EM) points over its standalone performance and surpasses two strong RAG baselines by 16.0 and 13.8 EM points, respectively, while maintaining low computational overhead.
Fahmida Alam, Mihai Surdeanu, Ellen Riloff
Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

When Bigger Isn't Better: A Comprehensive Fairness Evaluation of Political Bias in Multi-News Summarisation

Multi-document news summarisation systems are increasingly adopted for their convenience in processing vast daily news content, making fairness across diverse political perspectives critical. However, these systems can exhibit political bias through unequal representation of viewpoints, disproportionate emphasis on certain perspectives, and systematic underrepresentation of minority voices. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of such bias in multi-document news summarisation using FairNews, a dataset of complete news articles with political orientation labels, examining how large language models (LLMs) handle sources with varying political leanings across 13 models and five fairness metrics. We investigate both baseline model performance and effectiveness of various debiasing interventions, including prompt-based and judge-based approaches. Our findings challenge the assumption that larger models yield fairer outputs, as mid-sized variants consistently outperform their larger counterparts, offering the best balance of fairness and efficiency. Prompt-based debiasing proves highly model dependent, while entity sentiment emerges as the most stubborn fairness dimension, resisting all intervention strategies tested. These results demonstrate that fairness in multi-document news summarisation requires multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks and targeted, architecture-aware debiasing rather than simply scaling up.
Nannan Huang, Iffat Maab, Junichi Yamagishi
Apr 22, 2026cs.CL

DWTSumm: Discrete Wavelet Transform for Document Summarization

Summarizing long, domain-specific documents with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging due to context limitations, information loss, and hallucinations, particularly in clinical and legal settings. We propose a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)-based multi-resolution framework that treats text as a semantic signal and decomposes it into global (approximation) and local (detail) components. Applied to sentence- or word-level embeddings, DWT yields compact representations that preserve overall structure and critical domain-specific details, which are used directly as summaries or to guide LLM generation. Experiments on clinical and legal benchmarks demonstrate comparable ROUGE-L scores. Compared to a GPT-4o baseline, the DWT based summarization consistently improve semantic similarity and grounding, achieving gains of over 2% in BERTScore, more than 4% in Semantic Fidelity, factual consistency in legal tasks, and large METEOR improvements indicative of preserved domain-specific semantics. Across multiple embedding models, Fidelity reaches up to 97%, suggesting that DWT acts as a semantic denoising mechanism that reduces hallucinations and strengthens factual grounding. Overall, DWT provides a lightweight, generalizable method for reliable long-document and domain-specific summarization with LLMs.
Rana Salama, Abdou Youssef, Mona Diab
Apr 22, 2026cs.AI

Participatory provenance as representational auditing for AI-mediated public consultation

Artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed to synthesize large-scale public input in policy consultations and participatory processes. Yet no formal framework exists for auditing whether these summaries faithfully represent the source population, an accountability gap that existing approaches to AI explainability, grounding and hallucination detection do not address because they focus on output quality rather than input fidelity. Here, participatory provenance is introduced: a measurement framework grounded in optimal transport theory, causal inference and semantic analysis that tracks how individual public submissions are transformed, filtered or lost through AI-mediated summarization. Applied to Canada's 2025-2026 national AI Strategy consultation (n=5,253n = 5{,}253 respondents across two independent policy topics), the framework reveals that both official government summaries underperform a random-participant baseline (9.1%-9.1\% and 8.0%-8.0\% coverage degradation), with 16.9%16.9\% and 15.3%15.3\% of participants effectively excluded. Exclusion concentrates in clusters expressing dissent, scepticism and critique of AI (3333-88%88\% exclusion rates). Brevity, semantic isolation and rhetorical register independently predict representational outcome. An accompanying open-source interactive tool, the Co-creation Provenance Lab, enables policymakers to audit and iteratively improve summaries, establishing genuine human-in-the-loop oversight at scale.
Sachit Mahajan
Apr 22, 2026cs.AI

ActuBench: A Multi-Agent LLM Pipeline for Generation and Evaluation of Actuarial Reasoning Tasks

We present ActuBench, a multi-agent LLM pipeline for the automated generation and evaluation of advanced actuarial assessment items aligned with the International Actuarial Association (IAA) Education Syllabus. The pipeline separates four LLM roles by adapter: one agent drafts items, one constructs distractors, a third independently verifies both stages and drives bounded one-shot repair loops, and a cost-optimized auxiliary agent handles Wikipedia-note summarization and topic labelling. The items, per-model responses and complete leaderboard are published as a browsable web interface at https://actubench.de/en/, allowing readers and practitioners to inspect individual items without a repository checkout. We evaluate 50 language models from eight providers on two complementary benchmarks -- 100 empirically hardest multiple-choice items and 100 open-ended items scored by an LLM judge -- and report three headline findings. First, multi-agent verification is load-bearing: the independent verifier flags a majority of drafted items on first pass, most of which the one-shot repair loop resolves. Second, locally-hosted open-weights inference sits on the cost-performance Pareto front: a Gemma~4 model running on consumer hardware and a Cerebras-hosted 120B open-weights model dominate the near-zero-cost region, with the latter within one item of the top of the leaderboard. Third, MCQ and LLM-as-Judge rankings differ meaningfully: the MCQ scaffold inflates the performance ceiling, and Judge-mode evaluation is needed to discriminate at the frontier.
Jan-Philipp Schmidt
Apr 22, 2026cs.CL

Whose Story Gets Told? Positionality and Bias in LLM Summaries of Life Narratives

Increasingly, studies are exploring using Large Language Models (LLMs) for accelerated or scaled qualitative analysis of text data. While we can compare LLM accuracy against human labels directly for deductive coding, or labeling text, it is more challenging to judge the ethics and effectiveness of using LLMs in abstractive methods such as inductive thematic analysis. We collaborate with psychologists to study the abstractive claims LLMs make about human life stories, asking, how does using an LLM as an interpreter of meaning affect the conclusions and perspectives of a study? We propose a summarization-based pipeline for surfacing biases in perspective-taking an LLM might employ in interpreting these life stories. We demonstrate that our pipeline can identify both race and gender bias with the potential for representational harm. Finally, we encourage the use of this analysis in future studies involving LLM-based interpretation of study participants' written text or transcribed speech to characterize a positionality portrait for the study.
Melanie Subbiah, Haaris Mian, Nicholas Deas +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.CY

Bias in the Tails: How Name-conditioned Evaluative Framing in Resume Summaries Destabilizes LLM-based Hiring

Research has documented LLMs' name-based bias in hiring and salary recommendations. In this paper, we instead consider a setting where LLMs generate candidate summaries for downstream assessment. In a large-scale controlled study, we analyze nearly one million resume summaries produced by 4 models under systematic race-gender name perturbations, using synthetic resumes and real-world job postings. By decomposing each summary into resume-grounded factual content and evaluative framing, we find that factual content remains largely stable, while evaluative language exhibits subtle name-conditioned variation concentrated in the extremes of the distribution, especially in open-source models. Our hiring simulation demonstrates how evaluative summary transforms directional harm into symmetric instability that might evade conventional fairness audit, highlighting a potential pathway for LLM-to-LLM automation bias.
Huy Nghiem, Phuong-Anh Nguyen-Le, Sy-Tuyen Ho +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.MA

FOCAL: Filtered On-device Continuous Activity Logging for Efficient Personal Desktop Summarization

Desktop interaction streams provide a continuous, privacy-sensitive record of interleaved user tasks. Transforming these streams into task-organized personal logs on-device faces two main challenges: exhaustive Vision-Language Model (VLM) processing strains local resources, and global stream processing causes cross-task context pollution. We present FOCAL (Filtered On-device Continuous Activity Logging), a privacy-first multi-agent system utilizing a unified filter-plan-log architecture. It cascades a lightweight Filter Agent for noise suppression, a text-only Brain Agent for task attribution, a Record Agent for selective visual reasoning, and a task-isolated Memory Agent for context-coherent summarization. Experiments on DesktopBench (comprising 2,572 screenshots across 420 complex sessions) show FOCAL reduces total token consumption by 60.4% and VLM call count by 72.3% versus a baseline, while boosting Key Information Recall (KIR) from 0.38 to 0.61. Crucially, under ABAA{\to}B{\to}A task interruptions, FOCAL maintains Task Acc 0.81 and KIR 0.80, whereas the baseline collapses to Task Acc 0.03. FOCAL pioneers the efficient, on-device summarization of instruction-free desktop streams into multi-perspective personal logs.
Haoran Yin, Zhiyuan Wen, Jiannong Cao +2
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

Evaluating LLM-Driven Summarisation of Parliamentary Debates with Computational Argumentation

Understanding how policy is debated and justified in parliament is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. However, the volume and complexity of such debates mean that outside audiences struggle to engage. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enable automated summarisation at scale. While summaries of debates can make parliamentary procedures more accessible, evaluating whether these summaries faithfully communicate argumentative content remains challenging. Existing automated summarisation metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgements of consistency (i.e., faithfulness or alignment between summary and source). In this work, we propose a formal framework for evaluating parliamentary debate summaries that grounds argument structures in the contested proposals up for debate. Our novel approach, driven by computational argumentation, focuses the evaluation on formal properties concerning the faithful preservation of the reasoning presented to justify or oppose policy outcomes. We demonstrate our methods using a case-study of debates from the European Parliament and associated LLM-driven summaries.
Eoghan Cunningham, Derek Greene, James Cross +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

SCURank: Ranking Multiple Candidate Summaries with Summary Content Units for Enhanced Summarization

Small language models (SLMs), such as BART, can achieve summarization performance comparable to large language models (LLMs) via distillation. However, existing LLM-based ranking strategies for summary candidates suffer from instability, while classical metrics (e.g., ROUGE) are insufficient to rank high-quality summaries. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{SCURank}, a framework that enhances summarization by leveraging \textbf{Summary Content Units (SCUs)}. Instead of relying on unstable comparisons or surface-level overlap, SCURank evaluates summaries based on the richness and semantic importance of information content. We investigate the effectiveness of SCURank in distilling summaries from multiple diverse LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that SCURank outperforms traditional metrics and LLM-based ranking methods across evaluation measures and datasets. Furthermore, our findings show that incorporating diverse LLM summaries enhances model abstractiveness and overall distilled model performance, validating the benefits of information-centric ranking in multi-LLM distillation. The code for SCURank is available at https://github.com/IKMLab/SCURank.
Bo-Jyun Wang, Ying-Jia Lin, Hung-Yu Kao
Apr 20, 2026cs.AI

Beyond One Output: Visualizing and Comparing Distributions of Language Model Generations

Users typically interact with and evaluate language models via single outputs, but each output is just one sample from a broad distribution of possible completions. This interaction hides distributional structure such as modes, uncommon edge cases, and sensitivity to small prompt changes, leading users to over-generalize from anecdotes when iterating on prompts for open-ended tasks. Informed by a formative study with researchers who use LMs (n=13) examining when stochasticity matters in practice, how they reason about distributions over language, and where current workflows break down, we introduce GROVE. GROVE is an interactive visualization that represents multiple LM generations as overlapping paths through a text graph, revealing shared structure, branching points, and clusters while preserving access to raw outputs. We evaluate across three crowdsourced user studies (N=47, 44, and 40 participants) targeting complementary distributional tasks. Our results support a hybrid workflow: graph summaries improve structural judgments such as assessing diversity, while direct output inspection remains stronger for detail-oriented questions.
Emily Reif, Claire Yang, Jared Hwang +3
Apr 20, 2026cs.AI

Agentic Forecasting using Sequential Bayesian Updating of Linguistic Beliefs

We present the Bayesian Linguistic Forecaster (BLF), an agentic system for binary forecasting that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ForecastBench benchmark. The system is built on three ideas. (1) Linguistic belief state: a semi-structured representation combining numerical probability estimates with natural-language evidence summaries, updated by the LLM at each step of an iterative tool-use loop. This contrasts with the common approach of appending all retrieved evidence to an ever-growing, unstructured context. (2) Hierarchical multi-trial aggregation: running KK independent trials and combining them using logit-space averaging shrinkage with a data-dependent prior. (3) Hierarchical calibration: Platt scaling with a hierarchical prior, which avoids over-shrinking extreme predictions for sources with skewed base rates. On 400 questions from the ForecastBench leaderboard, BLF outperforms all the top public methods, including Cassi, GPT-5, Grok~4.20, and Foresight-32B. Careful ablation studies, using mixed effects analysis to control for question variability (which accounts for 62% of the variance in performance), reveals that all 3 components contribute to the overall gains, but some components matter more than others, depending on the base LLM, and the setting (e.g.\ with or without a crowd prior). All our experiments are based on a robust back-testing framework which we develop, which has a leakage rate below 1.5%, and may be of independent interest.
Kevin Murphy
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

MASS-RAG: Multi-Agent Synthesis Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to incorporate external knowledge at inference time. However, when retrieved contexts are noisy, incomplete, or heterogeneous, a single generation process often struggles to reconcile evidence effectively. We propose \textbf{MASS-RAG}, a multi-agent synthesis approach to retrieval-augmented generation that structures evidence processing into multiple role-specialized agents. MASS-RAG applies distinct agents for evidence summarization, evidence extraction, and reasoning over retrieved documents, and combines their outputs through a dedicated synthesis stage to produce the final answer. This design exposes multiple intermediate evidence views, allowing the model to compare and integrate complementary information before answer generation. Experiments on four benchmarks show that MASS-RAG consistently improves performance over strong RAG baselines, particularly in settings where relevant evidence is distributed across retrieved contexts.
Xingchen Xiao, Heyan Huang, Runheng Liu +1
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

HiGMem: A Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System for Long-Term Conversational Agents

Long-term conversational large language model (LLM) agents require memory systems that can recover relevant evidence from historical interactions without overwhelming the answer stage with irrelevant context. However, existing memory systems, including hierarchical ones, still often rely solely on vector similarity for retrieval. It tends to produce bloated evidence sets: adding many superficially similar dialogue turns yields little additional recall, but lowers retrieval precision, increases answer-stage context cost, and makes retrieved memories harder to inspect and manage. To address this, we propose HiGMem (Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System), a two-level event-turn memory system that allows LLMs to use event summaries as semantic anchors to predict which related turns are worth reading. This allows the model to inspect high-level event summaries first and then focus on a smaller set of potentially useful turns, providing a concise and reliable evidence set through reasoning, while avoiding the retrieval overhead that would be excessively high compared to vector retrieval. On the LoCoMo10 benchmark, HiGMem achieves the best F1 on four of five question categories and improves adversarial F1 from 0.54 to 0.78 over A-Mem, while retrieving an order of magnitude fewer turns. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HiGMem.
Shuqi Cao, Jingyi He, Fei Tan
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

Mix and Match: Context Pairing for Scalable Topic-Controlled Educational Summarisation

Topic-controlled summarisation enables users to generate summaries focused on specific aspects of source documents. This paper investigates a data augmentation strategy for training small language models (sLMs) to perform topic-controlled summarisation. We propose a pairwise data augmentation method that combines contexts from different documents to create contrastive training examples, enabling models to learn the relationship between topics and summaries more effectively. Using the SciTLDR dataset enriched with Wikipedia-derived topics, we systematically evaluate how augmentation scale affects model performance. Results show consistent improvements in win rate and semantic alignment as the augmentation scale increases, while the amount of real training data remains fixed. Consequently, a T5-base model trained with our augmentation approach achieves competitive performance relative to larger models, despite using significantly fewer parameters and substantially fewer real training examples.
Nathikan Yodthapa, Thanapong Intharah, Sahan Bulathwela
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL

ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts

Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce ThreadSumm, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, ThreadSumm employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.
Olubusayo Olabisi, Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL

Calibrating Model-Based Evaluation Metrics for Summarization

Recent advances in summary evaluation are based on model-based metrics to assess quality dimensions, such as completeness, conciseness, and faithfulness. However, these methods often require large language models, and predicted scores are frequently miscalibrated, limiting their reliability. Moreover, evaluating the average quality across different summaries for a single document typically requires access to multiple reference summaries. Here, we propose a general framework that generates individual and average proxy scores without relying on reference summaries, human annotations, or expensive model-based metrics. We also propose group isotonic regression binning (GIRB), a calibration method that adjusts the raw predictions to better align with ground-truth evaluation metrics. While we focus on continuous-value scenarios, such as summarization, the method is applicable to discrete-value tasks, such as question answering. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines.
Hongye Liu, Dhanajit Brahma, Ricardo Henao
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL

Learning to Control Summaries with Score Ranking

Recent advances in summarization research focus on improving summary quality across multiple criteria, such as completeness, conciseness, and faithfulness, by jointly optimizing these dimensions. However, these efforts largely overlook the challenge of controlling summary generation with respect to individual criteria, especially in the presence of their inherent trade-offs. For example, enhancing conciseness can compromise completeness, and vice versa. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a loss function that aligns model outputs with fine-grained, model-based evaluation scores (e.g., from FineSurE), enabling both improvement in summary quality and dimension-specific control. Our approach improves the overall quality of summaries while maintaining the ability to selectively prioritize one criterion over others. Experiments on three pretrained models (LLaMA, Qwen, and Mistral) demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art summarizers, while uniquely offering strong controllability over individual quality dimensions.
Hongye Liu, Liang Ding, Ricardo Henao
Apr 19, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Overlap Metrics: Rewarding Reasoning and Preferences for Faithful Multi-Role Dialogue Summarization

Multi-role dialogue summarization requires modeling complex interactions among multiple speakers while preserving role-specific information and factual consistency. However, most existing methods optimize for automatic metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore, which favor surface-level imitation of references rather than genuine gains in faithfulness or alignment with human preferences. We propose a novel framework that couples explicit cognitive-style reasoning with reward-based optimization for multi-role dialogue summarization. Our method first distills structured reasoning traces (e.g., step-by-step inferences and intermediate reflections) from a large teacher model and uses them as auxiliary supervision to initialize a reasoning-aware summarizer via staged supervised fine-tuning. It then applies GRPO with a dual-principle reward that blends metric-based signals with human-aligned criteria targeting key information coverage, implicit inference, factual faithfulness, and conciseness. Experiments on multilingual multi-role dialogue benchmarks show that our method matches strong baselines on ROUGE and BERTScore. Specifically, results on CSDS confirm the framework's stability in semantic consistency, while in-depth analysis on SAMSum demonstrates clear gains in factual faithfulness and model-based preference alignment. These findings underscore the value of reasoning-aware and preference-aware training for reliable dialogue summarization. Checkpoints and datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/NebulaPixel/summorchestra-multirole-summary.
Xiaoyong Mei, Tingting Zuo, Da Chen +5
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

Consistency Analysis of Sentiment Predictions using Syntactic & Semantic Context Assessment Summarization (SSAS)

The fundamental challenge of using Large Language Models (LLMs) for reliable, enterprise-grade analytics, such as sentiment prediction, is the conflict between the LLMs' inherent stochasticity (generative, non-deterministic nature) and the analytical requirement for consistency. The LLM inconsistency, coupled with the noisy nature of chaotic modern datasets, renders sentiment predictions too volatile for strategic business decisions. To resolve this, we present a Syntactic & Semantic Context Assessment Summarization (SSAS) framework for establishing context. Context established by SSAS functions as a sophisticated data pre-processing framework that enforces a bounded attention mechanism on LLMs. It achieves this by applying a hierarchical classification structure (Themes, Stories, Clusters) and an iterative Summary-of-Summaries (SoS) based context computation architecture. This endows the raw text with high-signal, sentiment-dense prompts, that effectively mitigate both irrelevant data and analytical variance. We empirically evaluated the efficacy of SSAS, using Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite, against a direct-LLM approach across three industry-standard datasets - Amazon Product Reviews, Google Business Reviews, Goodreads Book Reviews - and multiple robustness scenarios. Our results show that our SSAS framework is capable of significantly improving data quality, up to 30%, through a combination of noise removal and improvement in the estimation of sentiment prediction. Ultimately, consistency in our context-estimation capabilities provides a stable and reliable evidence base for decision-making.
Sharookh Daruwalla, Nitin Mayande, Shreeya Verma Kathuria +2
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Literal Summarization: Redefining Hallucination for Medical SOAP Note Evaluation

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for clinical documentation tasks such as SOAP note generation remains challenging. Unlike standard summarization, these tasks require clinical abstraction, normalization of colloquial language, and medically grounded inference. However, prevailing evaluation methods including automated metrics and LLM as judge frameworks rely on lexical faithfulness, often labeling any information not explicitly present in the transcript as hallucination. We show that such approaches systematically misclassify clinically valid outputs as errors, inflating hallucination rates and distorting model assessment. Our analysis reveals that many flagged hallucinations correspond to legitimate clinical transformations, including synonym mapping, abstraction of examination findings, diagnostic inference, and guideline consistent care planning. By aligning evaluation criteria with clinical reasoning through calibrated prompting and retrieval grounded in medical ontologies we observe a significant shift in outcomes. Under a lexical evaluation regime, the mean hallucination rate is 35%, heavily penalizing valid reasoning. With inference aware evaluation, this drops to 9%, with remaining cases reflecting genuine safety concerns. These findings suggest that current evaluation practices over penalize valid clinical reasoning and may measure artifacts of evaluation design rather than true errors, underscoring the need for clinically informed evaluation in high context domains like medicine.
Bhavik Vachhani, Kush Shrisvastava, Pranshu Nema +1
Apr 16, 2026cs.SE

Prompt-Driven Code Summarization: A Systematic Literature Review

Software documentation is essential for program comprehension, developer onboarding, code review, and long-term maintenance. Yet producing quality documentation manually is time-consuming and frequently yields incomplete or inconsistent results. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution by automatically generating natural language descriptions from source code, helping developers understand code more efficiently, facilitating maintenance, and supporting downstream activities such as defect localization and commit message generation. However, the effectiveness of LLMs in documentation tasks critically depends on how they are prompted. Properly structured instructions can substantially improve model performance, making prompt engineering-the design of input prompts to guide model behavior-a foundational technique in LLM-based software engineering. Approaches such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and zero-shot learning show promise for code summarization, yet current research remains fragmented. There is limited understanding of which prompting strategies work best, for which models, and under what conditions. Moreover, evaluation practices vary widely, with most studies relying on overlap-based metrics that may not capture semantic quality. This systematic literature review consolidates existing evidence, categorizes prompting paradigms, examines their effectiveness, and identifies gaps to guide future research and practical adoption.
Afia Farjana, Zaiyu Cheng, Antonio Mastropaolo
Mar 27, 2026cs.CR

Knowdit: Agentic Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Auditing Knowledge Summarization

Smart contracts govern billions of dollars in decentralized finance (DeFi), yet automated vulnerability detection remains challenging because many vulnerabilities are tightly coupled with project-specific business logic. We observe that recurring vulnerabilities across diverse DeFi business models often share the same underlying economic mechanisms, which we term DeFi semantics, and that capturing these shared abstractions can enable more systematic auditing. Building on this insight, we propose Knowdit, a knowledge-driven, agentic workflow for smart contract vulnerability detection. Knowdit first constructs an auditing knowledge graph from historical human audit reports, linking fine-grained DeFi semantics with recurring vulnerability patterns. Given a new project, a multi-agent pipeline leverages this knowledge through an iterative loop of specification generation, Proof-of-Concept (PoC) synthesis, PoC execution, and finding reflection, driven by a shared repository index. We evaluate Knowdit on 11 recent Code4rena projects with 84 ground-truth vulnerabilities. Knowdit detects all 21 high-severity and 90% of medium-severity vulnerabilities without false positives, fully covering eight projects, significantly outperforming all baselines. Applied to seven real-world projects, Knowdit further discovers 9 high- and 36 medium-severity previously unknown vulnerabilities, securing millions in liquidity and proving its outstanding performance.
Ziqiao Kong, Wanxu Xia, Chong Wang +6
Mar 17, 2026cs.CL

SciZoom: A Large-scale Benchmark for Hierarchical Scientific Summarization across the LLM Era

The explosive growth of AI research has created unprecedented information overload, increasing the demand for scientific summarization at multiple levels of granularity beyond traditional abstracts. While LLMs are increasingly adopted for summarization, existing benchmarks remain limited in scale, target only a single granularity, and predate the LLM era. Moreover, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, researchers have rapidly adopted LLMs for drafting manuscripts themselves, fundamentally transforming scientific writing, yet no resource exists to analyze how this writing has evolved. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciZoom, a benchmark comprising 44,946 papers from four top-tier ML venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, EMNLP) spanning 2020 to 2025, explicitly stratified into Pre-LLM and Post-LLM eras. SciZoom provides three hierarchical summarization targets (Abstract, Contributions, and TL;DR) achieving compression ratios up to 600:1, enabling both multi-granularity summarization research and temporal mining of scientific writing patterns. Our linguistic analysis reveals striking shifts in phrase patterns (up to 10x for formulaic expressions) and rhetorical style (23% decline in hedging), suggesting that LLM-assisted writing produces more confident yet homogenized prose. SciZoom serves as both a challenging benchmark and a unique resource for mining the evolution of scientific discourse in the generative AI era. Our code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/janghana/SciZoom) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/hanjang/SciZoom), respectively.
Han Jang, Junhyeok Lee, Kyu Sung Choi
Mar 11, 2026cs.CL

Coverage-Controlled Preference Mining from Noisy Claim Verification for Evidence-Grounded Generation

Evidence-grounded generation produces summaries whose claims should be supported by supplied evidence, but claim-level verifiers provide noisy feedback and can reward models that simply say less. We study this problem in clinical Brief Hospital Course summarization, where outputs must remain grounded in patient-specific EHR evidence. We introduce VERI-DPO, a preference-mining framework that converts noisy claim verification into coverage-controlled summary-level preferences. For each evidence-window prompt, VERI-DPO samples multiple candidate summaries, decomposes them into claims, verifies each claim against patient evidence, and forms a preference pair only when the chosen summary has better aggregate verifier-estimated support while retaining comparable verifiable content. Standard Direct Preference Optimization then distills these pairs into a single-sample policy, avoiding inference-time reranking. On patient-disjoint MIMIC-III-Ext-VeriFact-BHC test data, VERI-DPO reduces Not Supported rates from 10.7% to 1.9% under the mining verifier and from 11.6% to 6.4% under a separately prompted GPT-4o judge. In 100 blinded pairwise assessments by two domain researchers, VERI-DPO is preferred over the base model 56 times versus 18 times for factual faithfulness. In a locked zero-shot MIMIC-IV-Ext-BHC transfer test with 1,000 patients and no model adaptation, VERI-DPO lowers Not Supported rates with nearly unchanged scored-claim counts. Multi-seed ablations show that verifier-guided pair construction drives the gains, while coverage and anti-degeneration controls prevent apparent factuality improvements from coming from shorter or less checkable outputs.
Weixin Liu, Congning Ni, Qingyuan Song +4
Jan 13, 2026cs.CL

STAGE: A Full-Screenplay Benchmark for Reasoning over Evolving Stories

Movie screenplays are rich long-form narratives that interleave complex character relationships, temporally ordered events, and dialogue-driven interactions. While prior benchmarks target individual subtasks such as question answering or dialogue generation, they rarely evaluate whether models can construct a coherent story world and use it consistently across multiple forms of reasoning and generation. We introduce STAGE (Screenplay Text, Agents, Graphs and Evaluation), a unified benchmark for narrative understanding over full-length movie screenplays. STAGE defines four tasks: knowledge graph construction, scene-level event summarization, long-context screenplay question answering, and in-script character role-playing, all grounded in a shared narrative world representation. The benchmark provides cleaned scripts, curated knowledge graphs, and event- and character-centric annotations for 150 films across English and Chinese, enabling holistic evaluation of models' abilities to build world representations, abstract and verify narrative events, reason over long narratives, and generate character-consistent responses.
Qiuyu Tian, Zequn Liu, Yiding Li +9
Jan 8, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Static Summarization: Proactive Memory Extraction for LLM Agents

Memory management is vital for LLM agents in long-term and personalized interactions. Most previous work studies how to retrieve and use memory, but pays less attention to how memory is extracted. We find two main limitations in existing methods. First, extraction is "ahead-of-time": the agent saves information before it knows future tasks. A single summary prompt often mixes details, events, and relations, so useful information is lost. Second, extraction is usually one-off. Without verification, errors and hallucinations may stay in memory for a long time. To address these limitations, we propose ProMem, a proactive memory extraction framework. It separates details, events, and relations, and uses different extraction strategies for each type. It also checks completeness to recover missed events and verifies facts at the atomic level to reduce hallucinations. Experiments show that ProMem improves memory completeness and QA accuracy, while keeping a good balance between quality and token cost.
Chengyuan Yang, Zequn Sun, Wei Wei +1
Jan 7, 2026cs.CL

Gavel: Agent Meets Checklist for Evaluating LLMs on Long-Context Legal Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) now support contexts of up to 1M tokens, but their strengths and weaknesses on complex long-context tasks remain unclear. To study this, we focus on multi-document legal case summarization, where a single case often spans many documents exceeding 100K tokens. We systematically evaluate 12 frontier LLMs with Gavel, which consists of Gavel-Ref, a reference-based evaluation framework with checklist, residual-fact, and writing-style evaluations, and Gavel-Agent, a reference-free agent for evaluating factual coverage directly from source documents. Our results show that current models are more prone to omitting key information than hallucinating. They all perform well on simple checklist items, such as filing date, but struggle with rare and complex items, such as settlements. Performance also declines as case length increases. To meta-evaluate Gavel, we collect 160 hours of human annotations. Gavel-Agent reduces token usage by at least 36% compared to end-to-end and chunk-by-chunk methods while achieving competitive performance. Gavel-Agent also generalizes to the medical domain, performing the best with at least 77% fewer tokens.
Yao Dou, Benjamin Mamut, Wei Xu
Dec 19, 2025cs.CL

Narrative Consolidation: Formulating a New Task for Unifying Multi-Perspective Accounts

Processing overlapping narrative documents, such as legal testimonies or historical accounts, often aims not for compression but for a unified, coherent, and chronologically sound text. Standard Multi-Document Summarization (MDS), with its focus on conciseness, fails to preserve narrative flow. This paper formally defines this challenge as a new NLP task, Narrative Consolidation, focusing on chronological integrity, completeness, and the fusion of complementary details. We establish the resources needed to study it: a formal task definition, an evaluation paradigm, the Gospel Consolidation Language Resource -- a benchmark built from the four Biblical Gospels with 169 canonical events, cross-document alignments, and a reference consolidation -- and a suite of reference systems, ranging from timeline-agnostic heuristics to the Temporal Alignment Event Graph (TAEG). Benchmarking yields three findings. First, the explicit temporal backbone is the dominant factor: every system granted the canonical timeline raises ROUGE-L F1 from 0.206 to at least 0.81. Second, on a fusion-style reference, a simple length heuristic is remarkably strong (0.947 ROUGE-L F1), outperforming graph-based selection (0.846). Third, ablations show the discriminative signal resides in temporal edges, while intra-cluster lexical similarity is uninformative. These results establish Narrative Consolidation as a distinct task and pose an open challenge: to surpass that heuristic with a principled selection mechanism and true fusion of complementary details.
Roger A. Finger, Eduardo G. Cortes, Sandro J. Rigo +1
Dec 7, 2025cs.CE

TxSum: User-Centered Ethereum Transaction Understanding with Micro-Level Semantic Grounding

Understanding the economic intent of Ethereum transactions is critical for user safety, yet current tools expose only raw on-chain data or surface-level intent, leading to widespread ``blind signing'' (approving transactions without understanding them). Through interviews with 16 Web3 users, we find that effective explanations should be structured, risk-aware, and grounded at the token-flow level. Motivated by these findings, we formulate TxSum, a new domain-grounded NLP task for DeFi transaction explanation, and construct a dataset of 187 complex Ethereum transactions with 2,375 token-flow annotations and transaction-level summaries. We further introduce MATEX, a grounded multi-agent framework for high-stakes transaction explanation. It selectively retrieves external knowledge under uncertainty and audits explanations against raw traces to improve token-flow-level factual consistency. MATEX achieves the strongest overall explanation quality, especially on micro-level factuality and intent quality. It improves user comprehension on complex transactions from 52.9% to 76.5% over the strongest baseline and raises malicious-transaction rejection from 36.0% to 88.0%, while maintaining a low false-rejection rate on benign transactions.
Zifan Peng, Jingyi Zheng, Yule Liu +8
Dec 6, 2025cs.HC

JEEVHITAA -- An HCAI Ecosystem to Support Collective Care

Current mobile health platforms are predominantly individual-centric and lack the support for coordinated, auditable multi-actor workflows. However, in many settings worldwide, health decisions are enacted through multi-actor coordination rather than individual users. We present JEEVHITAA, a cross-platform mobile system enabling role-aware sharing and verifiable information flows within permissioned care circles. JEEVHITAA ingests platform and device data, builds layered profiles from sensors and tiered onboarding, and enforces fine-grained, time-bounded access control across care graphs. Data stays secure both within the application and the cloud. Integrated retrieval-augmented Large Language Models produce structured, role-targeted summaries and action plans, offer evidence-grounded verification with provenance and confidence scores, and support advanced insights on reports. We describe the architecture, connector abstractions, and security primitives, and report robustness evaluations using synthetic, ontology-driven data and findings from a feasibility study with real-life care circles across 9-14 weeks. We outline plans for larger multi-site evaluations focusing on operational alignment, longitudinal trust & literacy impact, and relational friction & efforts to sink into the daily infrastructure.
Shyama Sastha Krishnamoorthy Srinivasan, Harsh Pala, Mohan Kumar +1
May 28, 2025cs.CL

Fair Document Valuation in LLM Summaries via Shapley Values

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly power search engines and AI assistants that retrieve and summarize content from many sources. By serving answers directly, these systems obscure the original content creators' contributions, threatening the compensation that sustains a healthy content ecosystem. We frame this as a problem of fair document valuation and compensation, and propose a framework based on the Shapley value. Because exact Shapley computation is prohibitively expensive at scale, we develop Cluster Shapley, an approximation that groups semantically similar documents via LLM embeddings and computes Shapley values at the cluster level, with formal bounds on both the approximation error and the induced revenue-attribution error. On Amazon product review data, off-the-shelf approximations such as Monte Carlo sampling and Kernel SHAP perform suboptimally in LLM settings, whereas Cluster Shapley substantially improves the efficiency--accuracy frontier. Simple attribution heuristics (e.g., equal or relevance-based allocation), though computationally cheap, yield highly unfair outcomes. Our approach is agnostic to the exact LLM used, the summarization process used, and the evaluation procedure, which makes it broadly applicable to a variety of summarization settings.
Zikun Ye, Hema Yoganarasimhan
May 23, 2025cs.CV

VIBE: Annotation-Free Video-to-Text Information Bottleneck Evaluation for TL;DR

Many decision-making tasks, where both accuracy and efficiency matter, still require human supervision. For example, tasks like traffic officers reviewing hour-long dashcam footage or researchers screening conference videos can benefit from concise summaries that reduce cognitive load and save time. Yet current vision-language models (VLMs) often produce verbose, redundant outputs that hinder task performance. Existing video caption evaluation depends on costly human annotations and overlooks the summaries' utility in downstream tasks. We address these gaps with Video-to-text Information Bottleneck Evaluation (VIBE), an annotation-free method that scores VLM outputs using two metrics: grounding (how well the summary aligns with visual content) and utility (how informative it is for the task). VIBE selects from randomly sampled VLM outputs by ranking them according to the two scores to support effective human decision-making. Human studies on LearningPaper24, SUTD-TrafficQA, and LongVideoBench show that summaries selected by VIBE consistently improve performance-boosting task accuracy by up to 61.23% and reducing response time by 75.77% compared to naive VLM summaries or raw video.
Shenghui Chen, Po-han Li, Sandeep Chinchali +1