Papers with ChartQA
VisDoT : Enhancing Visual Reasoning through Human-Like Interpretation Grounding and Decomposition of Thought (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Lack of perceptual grounding limits vision-language models' ability to interpret visual data . prior work on visualized data understanding focused on adapting VLMs to instruction tuning and chain-of-thought supervision . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances visual reasoning through human-like interpretation grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ChartQA and ChartQAPro benchmarks by +11.2%. |
Chart-based Reasoning: Transferring Capabilities from LLMs to VLMs (2024.findings-naacl)
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Victor Carbune, Hassan Mansoor, Fangyu Liu, Rahul Aralikatte, Gilles Baechler, Jindong Chen, Abhanshu Sharma
| Challenge: | Visual language models (VLMs) are achieving increasingly strong performance on multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer reasoning capabilities from large-language models to VLMs by constructing a 20x larger dataset and a larger dataset to improve general reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger models without an upstream OCR system while keeping inference time constant. |
Enhanced Chart Understanding via Visual Language Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to understand chart plots are difficult to apply to visual-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the chartQA benchmark by over 8% performance gains. |
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
Plot Twist: Multimodal Models Don’t Comprehend Simple Chart Details (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal models show remarkable performance in real-world benchmarks for chart and figure understanding like ChartQA that involve interpreting trends, comparing data points, and extracting insights from visuals. |
| Approach: | They propose to ask models basic questions about axes ranges and values to examine their visual understanding abilities in the context of charts. |
| Outcome: | The models perform well on complex tasks, but lack basic capabilities on basic questions. |
Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on human judgment to assess data accuracy and visual communication, which is costly and unscalable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses data representation quality and communicative clarity of charts using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. |
Self-play through Computational Runtimes improves Chart Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve impressive zero-shot performance on multimodal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-play programming interface which leverages visual reasoning models to generate code to decompose a complex visual reasoning task in sub-tasks and use it as a tool to solve decomposed tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on difficult chart reasoning benchmarks. |
MAmmoTH-VL: Eliciting Multimodal Reasoning with Instruction Tuning at Scale (2025.acl-long)
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Jiawei Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yuelin Bai, Bo Li, Yubo Wang, King Zhu, Graham Neubig, Wenhu Chen, Xiang Yue
| Challenge: | Current instruction-tuning datasets focus on simplistic visual question answering tasks, and provide phrase-level answers without any intermediate rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source multimodal large language models to train MLLMs on a dataset with 12M instruction-response pairs to elicit CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as MathVerse, MMMU-Pro, and MuirBench, and gains improvements of up to 4% on non-reasoning-based 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. |
MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering (2023.acl-long)
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Fangyu Liu, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Yasemin Altun, Nigel Collier, Julian Eisenschlos
| Challenge: | Visual language models that are pretraining on natural images or image-text pairs crawled from the web perform poorly on visual language tasks such as ChartQA and ChartQA. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are key capabilities in visual language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA by as much as 20%. |
ChartQAPro: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Ahmed Masry, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Mahir Ahmed, Aayush Bajaj, Firoz Kabir, Aaryaman Kartha, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mizanur Rahman, Shadikur Rahman, Mehrad Shahmohammadi, Megh Thakkar, Md Rizwan Parvez, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty
| Challenge: | Chart Question Answering systems are limited in their ability to interpret data visually and reason with visual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart-based chart question-answering system that includes 1,341 charts from 99 diverse sources and 1,948 questions in various types. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark includes 1,341 charts from 99 diverse sources and 1,948 questions in various types. |
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild? (2025.emnlp-main)
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An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Lei Liao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document understanding in the wild are based on scanned or digital documents . however, these benchmarks fail to capture the challenges posed by documents in the real world . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and is compared with digital or scanned documents. |
When Big Models Train Small Ones: Label-Free Model Parity Alignment for Efficient Visual Question Answering using Small VLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision and language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual question answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework to optimize L-VLMs by leveraging unlabeled images . they conduct extensive experiments on four diverse VQA benchmarks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves L-VLMs on four visual question answering benchmarks. |