# Characterizing Multimodal Long-form Summarization: A Case Study on Financial Reports

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18654/) (2023)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [BooookScore: A systematic exploration of book-length summarization in the era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00785/) (2023)
- [Summarization is (Almost) Dead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09558/) (2023)
- [EDGAR-CORPUS: Billions of Tokens Make The World Go Round](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14394/) (2021)
- [How Reliable Are Automatic Evaluation Methods for Instruction-Tuned LLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10770/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [UniMEL: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Entity Linking with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16160/) (2024)
- [CaseSumm: A Large-Scale Dataset for Long-Context Summarization from U.S. Supreme Court Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00097/) (2024)
- [Visual-Conversational Interface for Evidence-Based Explanation of Diabetes Risk Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02920/) (2025)
- [Personalized Chain-of-Thought Summarization of Financial News for Investor Decision Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05508/) (2025)
- [LOOMSUM: Weaving Quantitative and Narrative Evidence for Faithful Long Text-Table Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As large language models (LLMs) expand the power of natural language processing to handle long inputs, rigorous and systematic analyses are necessary to understand their abilities and behavior. A salient application is summarization, due to its ubiquity and controversy (e.g., researchers have declared the death of summarization). In this paper, we use financial report summarization as a case study because financial reports are not only long but also use numbers and tables extensively. We propose a computational framework for characterizing multimodal long-form summarization and investigate the behavior of Claude 2.0/2.1, GPT-4/3.5, and Cohere. We find that GPT-3.5 and Cohere fail to perform this summarization task meaningfully. For Claude 2 and GPT-4, we analyze the extractiveness of the summary and identify a position bias in LLMs. This position bias disappears after shuffling the input for Claude, which suggests that Claude seems to recognize important information. We also conduct a comprehensive investigation on the use of numeric data in LLM-generated summaries and offer a taxonomy of numeric hallucination. We employ prompt engineering to improve GPT-4's use of numbers with limited success. Overall, our analyses highlight the strong capability of Claude 2 in handling long multimodal inputs compared to GPT-4. The generated summaries and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/ChicagoHAI/characterizing-multimodal-long-form-summarization.