LVSum: A Benchmark for Timestamp-Aware Long Video Summarization

Abstract:Long video summarization presents significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in maintaining temporal fidelity over extended durations and producing summaries that are both semantically and temporally grounded. We introduce LVSum, a human-annotated benchmark for evaluating long-form video summarization with fine-grained temporal alignment. LVSum comprises 72 diverse videos spanning 13 domains with an average duration of 16 minutes, each annotated with up to 10 human-generated summaries containing temporal references. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs using newly introduced LLM-based metrics for content relevance and modality coherence, alongside standard automatic metrics. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) transcripts contribute substantially more to summarization quality than visual frames alone, (2) a significant performance gap persists between model-generated and human-written summaries, and (3) current MLLMs exhibit systematic weaknesses in temporal grounding, instruction adherence, and cross-modal coherence. We release the dataset and code.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2604.10024 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2604.10024v2 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.10024 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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