# Chain of Summaries: Summarization Through Iterative Questioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15719 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15719/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12652/) (2023)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04408/) (2023)
- [RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01352/) (2023)
- [ChatQA: Surpassing GPT-4 on Conversational QA and RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10225/) (2024)
- [SuRe: Summarizing Retrievals using Answer Candidates for Open-domain QA of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13081/) (2024)
- [SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14835/) (2023)
- [From Sparse to Dense: GPT-4 Summarization with Chain of Density Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04269/) (2023)
- [RAVEN: In-Context Learning with Retrieval-Augmented Encoder-Decoder Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07922/) (2023)
- [DiffuSum: Generation Enhanced Extractive Summarization with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01735/) (2023)
- [FIT-RAG: Black-Box RAG with Factual Information and Token Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14374/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly using external web content. However, much of this content is not easily digestible by LLMs due to LLM-unfriendly formats and limitations of context length. To address this issue, we propose a method for generating general-purpose, information-dense summaries that act as plain-text repositories of web content. Inspired by Hegel's dialectical method, our approach, denoted as Chain of Summaries (CoS), iteratively refines an initial summary (thesis) by identifying its limitations through questioning (antithesis), leading to a general-purpose summary (synthesis) that can satisfy current and anticipate future information needs. Experiments on the TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and SQUAD datasets demonstrate that CoS outperforms zero-shot LLM baselines by up to 66% and specialized summarization methods such as Chain of Density, BRIO and PEGASUS by up to 27%. CoS-generated summaries yield higher Q&A performance compared to the source content, while requiring substantially fewer tokens and being agnostic to the specific downstream LLM. CoS thus resembles an appealing option for website maintainers to make their content more accessible for LLMs, while retaining possibilities for human oversight.