Abstract
Text summarization requires models to condense content while preserving key qualities such as consistency and coherence. Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on this task and can be further improved through reinforcement learning (RL). However, most existing methods apply reward signals directly to undifferentiated token sequences, overlooking the varying importance of individual tokens to word and sentence level quality in summarization. In this paper, we propose Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization (TIAO), a novel reinforcement learning strategy that explicitly leverages token-importance awareness. Specifically, TIAO identifies core tokens based on token dependency and reweights a trajectory's advantage according to its overall dependencies. Experiments on the real world dataset show that our TIAO achieves highly competitive results, and that a 7B foundation model enhanced by TIAO performs comparably to GPT-4 and GPT-5-nano. Code is available at https://github.com/TechCloud-x/TIAO
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Li, Q., Bao, C., Zhu, X., Li, X., Cao, R., Chen, S., & Zhou, Z. (2026). TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization
MLA 9
Li, Qixiu, et al. "TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization.
Chicago (author–date)
Li, Qixiu, Chenlong Bao, Xiang Zhu, Xiaoyong Li, Ruixin Cao, Shukai Chen, and Zhenxiong Zhou. 2026. "TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization.
Harvard
Li, Q., Bao, C., Zhu, X., Li, X., Cao, R., Chen, S. and Zhou, Z. (2026) 'TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization.
Vancouver
Li Q, Bao C, Zhu X, Li X, Cao R, Chen S, et al. TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization
IEEE
Q. Li, C. Bao, X. Zhu, X. Li, R. Cao, S. Chen, and Z. Zhou, "TIAO: Token Importance-Aware Policy Optimization for Text Summarization," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/tiao-token-importance-aware-policy-optimization-for-text-summarization.