TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging

Liang Zhang, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Yichen Xu, Qin Jin, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang


Abstract
Charts are important for presenting and explaining complex data relationships. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in chart understanding. However, the sheer size of these models limits their use in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present TinyChart, an efficient MLLM for chart understanding with only 3B parameters. TinyChart overcomes two key challenges in efficient chart understanding: (1) reduce the burden of learning numerical computations through Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) learning, which trains the model to generate Python programs for numerical calculations, and (2) reduce lengthy vision feature sequences through Vision Token Merging, which gradually merges most similar vision tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 3B TinyChart achieves SOTA performance on various chart understanding benchmarks including ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart-to-Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. It outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters, and close-sourced MLLM GPT-4V on ChartQA, with higher throughput during inference due to a smaller model scale and more efficient vision encoding.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1882–1898
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.112
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liang Zhang, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Yichen Xu, Qin Jin, Ji Zhang, and Fei Huang. 2024. TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1882–1898, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.112.pdf