Long-video understanding has emerged as a crucial capability in real-world applications such as video surveillance, meeting summarization, educational lecture analysis, and sports broadcasting. However, it remains computationally prohibitive for VideoLLMs, primarily due to two bottlenecks: 1) sequential video decoding, the process of converting the raw bit stream to RGB frames can take up to a minute for hour-long video inputs, and 2) costly prefilling of up to several million tokens for LLM inference, resulting in high latency and memory use. To address these challenges, we propose QuickVideo, a system-algorithm co-design that substantially accelerates long-video understanding to support real-time downstream applications. It comprises three key innovations: QuickDecoder, a parallelized CPU-based video decoder that achieves 2-3 times speedup by splitting videos into keyframe-aligned intervals processed concurrently; QuickPrefill, a memory-efficient prefilling method using KV-cache pruning to support more frames with less GPU memory; and an overlapping scheme that overlaps CPU video decoding with GPU inference. Together, these components infernece time reduce by a minute on long video inputs, enabling scalable, high-quality video understanding even on limited hardware. Experiments show that QuickVideo generalizes across durations and sampling rates, making long video processing feasible in practice.
Meeting summarization is crucial in digital communication, but existing solutions struggle with salience identification to generate personalized, workable summaries, and context understanding to fully comprehend the meetings' content. Previous attempts to address these issues by considering related supplementary resources (e.g., presentation slides) alongside transcripts are hindered by models' limited context sizes and handling the additional complexities of the multi-source tasks, such as identifying relevant information in additional files and seamlessly aligning it with the meeting content. This work explores multi-source meeting summarization considering supplementary materials through a three-stage large language model approach: identifying transcript passages needing additional context, inferring relevant details from supplementary materials and inserting them into the transcript, and generating a summary from this enriched transcript. Our multi-source approach enhances model understanding, increasing summary relevance by ~9% and producing more content-rich outputs. We introduce a personalization protocol that extracts participant characteristics and tailors summaries accordingly, improving informativeness by ~10%. This work further provides insights on performance-cost trade-offs across four leading model families, including edge-device capable options. Our approach can be extended to similar complex generative tasks benefitting from additional resources and personalization, such as dialogue systems and action planning.
Meeting summarization has become a critical task considering the increase in online interactions. While new techniques are introduced regularly, their evaluation uses metrics not designed to capture meeting-specific errors, undermining effective evaluation. This paper investigates what the frequently used automatic metrics capture and which errors they mask by correlating automatic metric scores with human evaluations across a broad error taxonomy. We commence with a comprehensive literature review on English meeting summarization to define key challenges like speaker dynamics and contextual turn-taking and error types such as missing information and linguistic inaccuracy, concepts previously loosely defined in the field. We examine the relationship between characteristic challenges and errors by using annotated transcripts and summaries from Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence and autoregressive models from the general summary QMSum dataset. Through experimental validation, we find that different model architectures respond variably to challenges in meeting transcripts, resulting in different pronounced links between challenges and errors. Current default-used metrics struggle to capture observable errors, showing weak to mid-correlations, while a third of the correlations show trends of error masking. Only a subset reacts accurately to specific errors, while most correlations show either unresponsiveness or failure to reflect the error's impact on summary quality.
Meeting summarization has an enormous business potential, but in addition to being a hard problem, roll-out is challenged by privacy concerns. We explore the problem of meeting summarization under differential privacy constraints and find, to our surprise, that while differential privacy leads to slightly lower performance on in-sample data, differential privacy improves performance when evaluated on unseen meeting types. Since meeting summarization systems will encounter a great variety of meeting types in practical employment scenarios, this observation makes safe meeting summarization seem much more feasible. We perform extensive error analysis and identify potential risks in meeting summarization under differential privacy, including a faithfulness analysis.
Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/hahahawu/VCSum.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are constrained by their inability to process lengthy inputs, resulting in the loss of critical historical information. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose the Self-Controlled Memory (SCM) framework to enhance the ability of LLMs to maintain long-term memory and recall relevant information. Our SCM framework comprises three key components: an LLM-based agent serving as the backbone of the framework, a memory stream storing agent memories, and a memory controller updating memories and determining when and how to utilize memories from memory stream. Additionally, the proposed SCM is able to process ultra-long texts without any modification or fine-tuning, which can integrate with any instruction following LLMs in a plug-and-play paradigm. Furthermore, we annotate a dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of SCM for handling lengthy inputs. The annotated dataset covers three tasks: long-term dialogues, book summarization, and meeting summarization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better retrieval recall and generates more informative responses compared to competitive baselines in long-term dialogues. (https://github.com/wbbeyourself/SCM4LLMs)
Query-focused meeting summarization (QFMS) aims to generate summaries from meeting transcripts in response to a given query. Previous works typically concatenate the query with meeting transcripts and implicitly model the query relevance only at the token level with attention mechanism. However, due to the dilution of key query-relevant information caused by long meeting transcripts, the original transformer-based model is insufficient to highlight the key parts related to the query. In this paper, we propose a query-aware framework with joint modeling token and utterance based on Query-Utterance Attention. It calculates the utterance-level relevance to the query with a dense retrieval module. Then both token-level query relevance and utterance-level query relevance are combined and incorporated into the generation process with attention mechanism explicitly. We show that the query relevance of different granularities contributes to generating a summary more related to the query. Experimental results on the QMSum dataset show that the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
A system that could reliably identify and sum up the most important points of a conversation would be valuable in a wide variety of real-world contexts, from business meetings to medical consultations to customer service calls. Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved language generation systems, opening the door to improved forms of abstractive summarization, a form of summarization particularly well-suited for multi-party conversation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the challenges raised by the task of abstractive meeting summarization and of the data sets, models and evaluation metrics that have been used to tackle the problems.
Automatic meeting summarization is becoming increasingly popular these days. The ability to automatically summarize meetings and to extract key information could greatly increase the efficiency of our work and life. In this paper, we experiment with different approaches to improve the performance of query-based meeting summarization. We started with HMNet\cite{hmnet}, a hierarchical network that employs both a word-level transformer and a turn-level transformer, as the baseline. We explore the effectiveness of pre-training the model with a large news-summarization dataset. We investigate adding the embeddings of queries as a part of the input vectors for query-based summarization. Furthermore, we experiment with extending the locate-then-summarize approach of QMSum\cite{qmsum} with an intermediate clustering step. Lastly, we compare the performance of our baseline models with BART, a state-of-the-art language model that is effective for summarization. We achieved improved performance by adding query embeddings to the input of the model, by using BART as an alternative language model, and by using clustering methods to extract key information at utterance level before feeding the text into summarization models.
Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose Summ$^N$, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. Summ$^N$ first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM input size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both single-source documents and dialogues, and it can be used on top of different backbone abstractive summarization models. To the best of our knowledge, Summ$^N$ is the first multi-stage split-then-summarize framework for long input summarization. Our experiments demonstrate that Summ$^N$ outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/Summ-N.
Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans of meetings in response to a query, and we introduce QMSum, a new benchmark for this task. QMSum consists of 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. Besides, we investigate a locate-then-summarize method and evaluate a set of strong summarization baselines on the task. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that QMSum presents significant challenges in long meeting summarization for future research. Dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/Yale-LILY/QMSum}.
Meeting summarization is a challenging task due to its dynamic interaction nature among multiple speakers and lack of sufficient training data. Existing methods view the meeting as a linear sequence of utterances while ignoring the diverse relations between each utterance. Besides, the limited labeled data further hinders the ability of data-hungry neural models. In this paper, we try to mitigate the above challenges by introducing dialogue-discourse relations. First, we present a Dialogue Discourse-Dware Meeting Summarizer (DDAMS) to explicitly model the interaction between utterances in a meeting by modeling different discourse relations. The core module is a relational graph encoder, where the utterances and discourse relations are modeled in a graph interaction manner. Moreover, we devise a Dialogue Discourse-Aware Data Augmentation (DDADA) strategy to construct a pseudo-summarization corpus from existing input meetings, which is 20 times larger than the original dataset and can be used to pretrain DDAMS. Experimental results on AMI and ICSI meeting datasets show that our full system can achieve SOTA performance. Our codes will be available at: https://github.com/xcfcode/DDAMS.
Meetings are essential to modern organizations. Numerous meetings are held and recorded daily, more than can ever be comprehended. A meeting summarization system that identifies salient utterances from the transcripts to automatically generate meeting minutes can help. It empowers users to rapidly search and sift through large meeting collections. To date, the impact of domain terminology on the performance of meeting summarization remains understudied, despite that meetings are rich with domain knowledge. In this paper, we create gold-standard annotations for domain terminology on a sizable meeting corpus; they are known as jargon terms. We then analyze the performance of a meeting summarization system with and without jargon terms. Our findings reveal that domain terminology can have a substantial impact on summarization performance. We publicly release all domain terminology to advance research in meeting summarization.
Summarizing texts is not a straightforward task. Before even considering text summarization, one should determine what kind of summary is expected. How much should the information be compressed? Is it relevant to reformulate or should the summary stick to the original phrasing? State-of-the-art on automatic text summarization mostly revolves around news articles. We suggest that considering a wider variety of tasks would lead to an improvement in the field, in terms of generalization and robustness. We explore meeting summarization: generating reports from automatic transcriptions. Our work consists in segmenting and aligning transcriptions with respect to reports, to get a suitable dataset for neural summarization. Using a bootstrapping approach, we provide pre-alignments that are corrected by human annotators, making a validation set against which we evaluate automatic models. This consistently reduces annotators' efforts by providing iteratively better pre-alignment and maximizes the corpus size by using annotations from our automatic alignment models. Evaluation is conducted on \publicmeetings, a novel corpus of aligned public meetings. We report automatic alignment and summarization performances on this corpus and show that automatic alignment is relevant for data annotation since it leads to large improvement of almost +4 on all ROUGE scores on the summarization task.
With the abundance of automatic meeting transcripts, meeting summarization is of great interest to both participants and other parties. Traditional methods of summarizing meetings depend on complex multi-step pipelines that make joint optimization intractable. Meanwhile, there are a handful of deep neural models for text summarization and dialogue systems. However, the semantic structure and styles of meeting transcripts are quite different from articles and conversations. In this paper, we propose a novel abstractive summary network that adapts to the meeting scenario. We design a hierarchical structure to accommodate long meeting transcripts and a role vector to depict the difference among speakers. Furthermore, due to the inadequacy of meeting summary data, we pretrain the model on large-scale news summary data. Empirical results show that our model outperforms previous approaches in both automatic metrics and human evaluation. For example, on ICSI dataset, the ROUGE-1 score increases from 34.66% to 46.28%.
We introduce a novel graph-based framework for abstractive meeting speech summarization that is fully unsupervised and does not rely on any annotations. Our work combines the strengths of multiple recent approaches while addressing their weaknesses. Moreover, we leverage recent advances in word embeddings and graph degeneracy applied to NLP to take exterior semantic knowledge into account, and to design custom diversity and informativeness measures. Experiments on the AMI and ICSI corpus show that our system improves on the state-of-the-art. Code and data are publicly available, and our system can be interactively tested.