Augmenting a Large Language Model with a Combination of Text and Visual Data for Conversational Visualization of Global Geospatial Data

Omar Mena, Alexandre Kouyoumdjian, Lonni Besançon, Michael Gleicher, Ivan Viola, Anders Ynnerman

Abstract: We present a method for augmenting a Large Language Model (LLM) with a combination of text and visual data to enable accurate question answering in visualization of scientific data, making conversational visualization possible. LLMs struggle with tasks like visual data interaction, as they lack contextual visual information. We address this problem by merging a text description of a visualization and dataset with snapshots of the visualization. We extract their essential features into a structured text file, highly compact, yet descriptive enough to appropriately augment the LLM with contextual information, without any fine-tuning. This approach can be applied to any visualization that is already finally rendered, as long as it is associated with some textual description.