AskChart: Universal Chart Understanding through Textual Enhancement
Chart understanding tasks such as ChartQA and Chart-to-Text involve automatically extracting and interpreting key information from charts, enabling users to query or convert visual data into structured formats. State-of-the-art approaches primarily focus on visual cues from chart images, failing to explicitly incorporate rich textual information (e.g., data labels and axis labels) embedded within the charts. This textual information is vital for intuitive human comprehension and interpretation of charts. Moreover, existing models are often large and computationally intensive, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce AskChart, a universal model that explicitly integrates both textual and visual cues from charts using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. AskChart facilitates the learning of enhanced visual-textual representations of charts for effectively handling multiple chart understanding tasks, while maintaining a smaller model size. To capture the synergy between visual and textual modalities, we curate a large-scale dataset named ChartBank with about 7.5M data samples, which helps align textual and visual information and facilitates the extraction of visual entities and text. To effectively train AskChart, we design a three-stage training strategy to align visual and textual modalities for learning robust visual-textual representations and optimizing the learning of the MoE layer. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate the significant performance gains of AskChart in four chart understanding tasks. Remarkably, AskChart with 4.6B parameters outperforms state-of-the-art models with 13B parameters by 68.3% in Open-ended ChartQA and 49.2% in Chart-to-Text tasks, while achieving comparable performance in ChartQA and Chart-to-Table tasks.
Code (1)
Tasks
Chart UnderstandingMixture-of-ExpertsMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ChartAssisstant: A Universal Chart Multimodal Language Model via Chart-to-Table Pre-training and Multitask Instruction Tuning
Charts play a vital role in data visualization, understanding data patterns, and informed decision-making. However, their unique combination of graphical elements (e.g., bars, lines) and textual components (e.g., labels,…
Data VisualizationDecision MakingInstruction FollowingLanguage Modeling+1POLYCHARTQA: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models with Multilingual Chart Question Answering
Charts are a universally adopted medium for data communication, yet existing chart understanding benchmarks are overwhelmingly English-centric, limiting their accessibility and relevance to global audiences. To address t…
Chart Question AnsweringSTART: Spatial and Textual Learning for Chart Understanding
Chart understanding is crucial for deploying multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in real-world scenarios such as analyzing scientific papers and technical reports. Unlike natural images, charts pair a structured vis…
Code GenerationChartGalaxy: A Dataset for Infographic Chart Understanding and Generation
Infographic charts are a powerful medium for communicating abstract data by combining visual elements (e.g., charts, images) with textual information. However, their visual and structural richness poses challenges for la…
BenchmarkingChart UnderstandingCode GenerationMultimodal ReasoningChart-Text: A Fully Automated Chart Image Descriptor
Images greatly help in understanding, interpreting and visualizing data. Adding textual description to images is the first and foremost principle of web accessibility. Visually impaired users using screen readers will us…