# DWTSumm: Discrete Wavelet Transform for Document Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21070/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [Recent Advances in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07108/) (2015)
- [Adapted Large Language Models Can Outperform Medical Experts in Clinical Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07430/) (2023)
- [LinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15827/) (2022)
- [LongHealth: A Question Answering Benchmark with Long Clinical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14490/) (2024)
- [FactPICO: Factuality Evaluation for Plain Language Summarization of Medical Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11456/) (2024)
- [CLINICSUM: Utilizing Language Models for Generating Clinical Summaries from Patient-Doctor Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04254/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.
