Challenge: Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models can be useful for chart understanding, but their size limits their use in resource-constrained environments.
Approach: They propose an efficient multimodal large language model with only 3B parameters for chart understanding.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters on ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart to Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX.

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ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing open-source MLLMs fail to fully capture dense information embedded in charts . current models still face significant challenges in understanding and analyzing visual tasks such as captioning and question answering.
Approach: They propose a chart-to-code MLLM which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses existing open-source models on chart-to-code benchmarks with only 7B parameters and provides lossless representations that contain all critical details.
ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Currently, research on complex chart understanding tasks is limited . a pipeline for visual reasoning datasets addresses these limitations .
Approach: They propose a code-driven pipeline for generating visual reasoning datasets . pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation to retrieve professional chart templates .
Outcome: The proposed pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality through model-based evaluation.
MultiChartQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Multi-Chart Problems (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing chart understanding benchmarks focus on single-chart tasks, neglecting multi-hop reasoning required to extract and integrate information from multiple charts.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that evaluates MLLMs’ capabilities in four key areas: direct question answering, parallel question answering and comparative reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates MLLMs’ capabilities in four key areas: direct question answering, parallel question answering and comparative reasoning.
MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing large language models have limited ability to perform tasks effectively.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multimodal chart instruction dataset with 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types.
Outcome: The proposed LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks.
ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Chart question answering (ChartQA) tasks are a critical part of visualization charts.
Approach: They propose a chart question answering task that uses MLLMs to analyze charts . they propose 'Chain-of-Charts' textual prompt strategy that directs attention to visual elements .
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance by 14.41% and 80% in low-level ChartQA tasks.
Learning More from Less: Exploiting Counterfactuals for Data-Efficient Chart Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Chart understanding is a critical capability for vision-language models, serving as a cornerstone for automated data analysis, document understanding, and scientific research.
Approach: They propose a chart-efficient training framework to enhance counterfactual sensitivity by code modification and a similarity-based data selection strategy.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior or comparable performance to strong chart-specific VLMs while using significantly less training data.
Advancement in Graph Understanding: A Multimodal Benchmark and Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Graph data organizes complex relationships and interactions between objects . Graph neural networks (GNNs) are becoming more popular in graph learning .
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for interactive and instructional graph data understanding and reasoning . they first evaluate the capabilities of public VLMs in graph learning from multiple aspects .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves an accuracy increase of 5%-15% compared to baseline models . the best-performing model achieve scores comparable to Gemini in GPT-asissted Evaluation .
Deploying Tiny LVLM Judges for Real-World Evaluation of Chart Models: Lessons Learned and Best Practices (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with only 7B parameters perform poorly as judges in resource-constrained settings.
Approach: They propose two approaches to ensure costefficient evaluation by combining multiple criteria into a single query and domainadaptive transfer learning to create a 2Bparameter VLM on a chart dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model can effectively transfer knowledge from one dataset to another to make it a more specialized model.
Are Large Vision Language Models up to the Challenge of Chart Comprehension and Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies have demonstrated that large vision language models (LVLMs) are not multi-modal and lack multi-tasking capabilities.
Approach: They evaluate the performance of large vision language models (LVLMs) for chart understanding and reasoning tasks and compare them to open-source models.
Outcome: The proposed models demonstrate impressive abilities in generating fluent texts covering high-level data insights, but they also encounter common problems like hallucinations, factual errors, and data bias.
Judging the Judges: Can Large Vision-Language Models Fairly Evaluate Chart Comprehension and Reasoning? (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are expensive and time-consuming to evaluate . however, they are limited in their use in industrial settings due to their limited availability and limited resources.
Approach: They evaluate 13 open-source LVLMs as judges for diverse chart comprehension and reasoning tasks.
Outcome: The proposed models can be used to assess chart comprehension and reasoning tasks, but they are expensive and time-consuming.

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