Clinical abstractive summarization struggles to balance faithfulness and informativeness, sacrificing key information or introducing confabulations. Techniques like in-context learning and fine-tuning have improved overall summary quality orthogonally, without considering the above issue. Conversely, methods aimed at improving faithfulness and informativeness, such as model reasoning and self improvement, have not been systematically evaluated in the clinical domain. We address this gap by first performing a comprehensive benchmark and study of six advanced abstractive summarization methods across three datasets using five reference-based and reference-free metrics, with the latter specifically assessing faithfulness and informativeness. Based on its findings we then develop uMedSum, a modular hybrid framework introducing novel approaches for sequential confabulation removal and key information addition. Our work outperforms previous GPT-4-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both quantitative metrics and expert evaluations, achieving an 11.8% average improvement in dedicated faithfulness metrics over the previous SOTA. Doctors prefer uMedSum’s summaries 6 times more than previous SOTA in difficult cases containing confabulations or missing information. These results highlight uMedSum’s effectiveness and generalizability across various datasets and metrics, marking a significant advancement in clinical summarization. uMedSum toolkit is made available on GitHub.

Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.