# Minimal Clips, Maximum Salience: Long Video Summarization via Key Moment Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11399/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 41 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10188/) (2024)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [Bottom-Up Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10792/) (2018)
- [TVQA+: Spatio-Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11574/) (2019)
- [Entity-level Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09130/) (2021)
- [CLIP-It! Language-Guided Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00650/) (2021)
- [Frame-Voyager: Learning to Query Frames for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03226/) (2024)
- [ScisummNet: A Large Annotated Corpus and Content-Impact Models for Scientific Paper Summarization with Citation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01716/) (2019)
- [Multi-View Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Conversational Structure for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01672/) (2020)
- [Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09396/) (2024)
- [VideoRoPE: What Makes for Good Video Rotary Position Embedding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05173/) (2025)
- [Content Selection in Deep Learning Models of Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12343/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Dialogue Summarization: Recent Advances and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03175/) (2021)
- [AdaReTaKe: Adaptive Redundancy Reduction to Perceive Longer for Video-language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12559/) (2025)
- [Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05861/) (2024)
- [Topic-aware Pointer-Generator Networks for Summarizing Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01335/) (2019)
- [VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04471/) (2025)
- [Controllable Neural Dialogue Summarization with Personal Named Entity Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13070/) (2021)
- [Coreference-Aware Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08556/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are able to process increasingly longer videos. Yet, important visual information is easily lost throughout the entire context and missed by VLMs. Also, it is important to design tools that enable cost-effective analysis of lengthy video content. In this paper, we propose a clip selection method that targets key video moments to be included in a multimodal summary. We divide the video into short clips and generate compact visual descriptions of each using a lightweight video captioning model. These are then passed to a large language model (LLM), which selects the K clips containing the most relevant visual information for a multimodal summary. We evaluate our approach on reference clips for the task, automatically derived from full human-annotated screenplays and summaries in the MovieSum dataset. We further show that these reference clips (less than 6% of the movie) are sufficient to build a complete multimodal summary of the movies in MovieSum. Using our clip selection method, we achieve a summarization performance close to that of these reference clips while capturing substantially more relevant video information than random clip selection. Importantly, we maintain low computational cost by relying on a lightweight captioning model.