@inproceedings{saxena-etal-2025-postersum,
    title = "{P}oster{S}um: A Multimodal Benchmark for Scientific Poster Summarization",
    author = "Saxena, Rohit  and
      Minervini, Pasquale  and
      Keller, Frank",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.114/",
    pages = "1828--1844",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-303-6",
    abstract = "Generating accurate and concise textual summaries from multimodal documents is challenging, especially when dealing with visually complex content like scientific posters. We introduce PosterSum, a novel benchmark to advance the development of vision-language models that can understand and summarize scientific posters into research paper abstracts. Our dataset contains 16,305 conference posters paired with their corresponding abstracts as summaries. Each poster is provided in image format and presents diverse visual understanding challenges, such as complex layouts, dense text regions, tables, and figures. We benchmark state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on PosterSum and demonstrate that they struggle to accurately interpret and summarize scientific posters. We propose Segment {\&} Summarize, a hierarchical method that outperforms current MLLMs on automated metrics, achieving a 3.14{\%} gain in ROUGE-L. This will serve as a starting point for future research on poster summarization."
}