ChartBench: A Benchmark for Complex Visual Reasoning in Charts

Zhengzhuo Xu, SiNan Du, Yiyan Qi, Chengjin Xu, Chun Yuan, Jian Guo

Keywords: Multimodal Large Language Models, Chart Reasoning, Chart Benchmark, Chain of Thought

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in image understanding and generation. However, current benchmarks fail to accurately evaluate the chart comprehension of MLLMs due to limited chart types and inappropriate metrics. To address this, we propose ChartBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess chart comprehension and data reliability through complex visual reasoning. ChartBench includes 42 categories, 66.6k charts, and 600k question-answer pairs. Notably, we do not provide data point annotations on charts explicitly, which requires models to derive values by leveraging inherent chart elements such as color, legends, and coordinate systems. We also design an enhanced evaluation metric named Acc++ to evaluate MLLMs without extensive manual or costly LLM-based evaluations. Furthermore, we propose two baselines based on the chain of thought and supervised fine-tuning to improve model performance on unannotated charts. Extensive experimental evaluations of 18 open-sourced and 3 proprietary MLLMs reveal their limitations in chart comprehension and offer valuable insights for further research.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 2021