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Main Authors: Ali, Abid, Molla-Aliod, Diego, Naseem, Usman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11753
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author Ali, Abid
Molla-Aliod, Diego
Naseem, Usman
author_facet Ali, Abid
Molla-Aliod, Diego
Naseem, Usman
contents Multimodal summarization requires models to jointly understand textual and visual inputs to generate concise, semantically coherent summaries. Existing methods often inject shallow visual features into deep language models, leading to representational mismatches and weak cross-modal grounding. We propose a unified framework that jointly performs text summarization and representative image selection. Our system, SPeCTrA-Sum (Sampler Perceiver with Cross-modal Transformer and gated Attention for Summarization), introduces two key innovations. First, a Deep Visual Processor (DVP) aligns the visual encoder with the language model at corresponding depths, enabling hierarchical, layer-wise fusion that preserves semantic consistency. Second, a lightweight Visual Relevance Predictor (VRP) selects salient and diverse images by distilling soft labels from a Determinantal Point Processes (DPP) teacher. SPeCTrA-Sum is trained using a multi-objective loss that combines autoregressive summarization, cross-modal alignment, and DPP-based distillation. Experiments show that our system produces more accurate, visually grounded summaries and selects more representative images, demonstrating the benefits of depth-aware fusion and principled image selection for multimodal summarization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_11753
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Visually Grounded Multimodal Summarization via Cross-Modal Transformer and Gated Attention
Ali, Abid
Molla-Aliod, Diego
Naseem, Usman
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal summarization requires models to jointly understand textual and visual inputs to generate concise, semantically coherent summaries. Existing methods often inject shallow visual features into deep language models, leading to representational mismatches and weak cross-modal grounding. We propose a unified framework that jointly performs text summarization and representative image selection. Our system, SPeCTrA-Sum (Sampler Perceiver with Cross-modal Transformer and gated Attention for Summarization), introduces two key innovations. First, a Deep Visual Processor (DVP) aligns the visual encoder with the language model at corresponding depths, enabling hierarchical, layer-wise fusion that preserves semantic consistency. Second, a lightweight Visual Relevance Predictor (VRP) selects salient and diverse images by distilling soft labels from a Determinantal Point Processes (DPP) teacher. SPeCTrA-Sum is trained using a multi-objective loss that combines autoregressive summarization, cross-modal alignment, and DPP-based distillation. Experiments show that our system produces more accurate, visually grounded summaries and selects more representative images, demonstrating the benefits of depth-aware fusion and principled image selection for multimodal summarization.
title Towards Visually Grounded Multimodal Summarization via Cross-Modal Transformer and Gated Attention
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11753