Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission2798 Authors

Keywords: Chart Understanding, Code Generation, Multimodal Large Language Model

Abstract: Chart-to-code generation converts a chart image into an executable plotting script, enabling faithful reproduction and editable visualizations. Existing methods are largely Python-centric, limiting practical use and overlooking a critical source of supervision: the same chart can be expressed by semantically equivalent scripts in different plotting languages. To fill this gap, we introduce Chart2NCode, a dataset of 176K charts paired with aligned scripts in Python, R, and LaTeX that render visually equivalent outputs, constructed via a metadata-to-template pipeline with rendering verification and human quality checks. Building on a LLaVA-style architecture, we further propose CharLuMA, a parameter-efficient adaptation module that augments the multimodal projector with a language-conditioned mixture of low-rank subspaces, allowing the model to share core chart understanding while specializing code generation to the target language through lightweight routing. Extensive experiments show consistent gains in executability and visual fidelity across all languages, outperforming strong open-source baselines and remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Further analyses reveal that balanced multi-language supervision benefits all languages and that the adapter allocates a compact shared core plus language-specific capacity.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

Research Area Keywords: cross-modal content generation, cross-modal pretraining

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2798