ModalSyncSum: Synchronizing Image and Text for Reliable Summary Generation

Abstract

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) aims to generate coherent textual summaries while selecting the most semantically relevant images to enhance expressiveness. Despite the advancements of large multimodal models like GPT-4o, LLaMA-3, and Grok-3, these models often exhibit hallucination and weak visual-text alignment when applied to MSMO tasks. To address these challenges, we propose ModalSyncSum, a unified framework that enhances semantic consistency and visual faithfulness. It incorporates image-aware information extraction to mitigate visual-text misalignment, QA-based description verification to detect and correct hallucinated image descriptions, and named entity-guided refinement to ensure factual accuracy and entity alignment across modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation metric M3AS, which jointly considers image content coverage, text-image alignment, and summary consistency, filling the gap in evaluating multimodal summary quality. Experimental results show that our model outperforms prompt-based baselines across multiple datasets, achieving significant gains on ROUGE, BLEU, and BERTScore, with BLEU improving by 21.95%. In human evaluation, M3AS exhibits stronger correlation with human judgments in consistency, image-summary relevance, and focus, surpassing existing automatic metrics.