ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering

Yifan Wu, Lutao Yan, Leixian Shen, Yunhai Wang, Nan Tang, Yuyu Luo


Abstract
Chart question answering (ChartQA) tasks play a critical role in interpreting and extracting insights from visualization charts. While recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o have shown promise in high-level ChartQA tasks, such as chart captioning, their effectiveness in low-level ChartQA tasks (*e.g.*, identifying correlations) remains underexplored.In this paper, we address this gap by evaluating MLLMs on low-level ChartQA using a newly curated dataset, *ChartInsights*, which consists of 22,347 (chart, task, query, answer) covering 10 data analysis tasks across 7 chart types. We systematically evaluate 19 advanced MLLMs, including 12 open-source and 7 closed-source models. The average accuracy rate across these models is 39.8%, with GPT-4o achieving the highest accuracy at 69.17%.To further explore the limitations of MLLMs in low-level ChartQA, we conduct experiments that alter visual elements of charts (*e.g.*, changing color schemes, adding image noise) to assess their impact on the task effectiveness. Furthermore, we propose a new textual prompt strategy, *Chain-of-Charts*, tailored for low-level ChartQA tasks, which boosts performance by 14.41%, achieving an accuracy of 83.58%. Finally, incorporating a visual prompt strategy that directs attention to relevant visual elements further improves accuracy to 84.32%.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.710
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12174–12200
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.710
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yifan Wu, Lutao Yan, Leixian Shen, Yunhai Wang, Nan Tang, and Yuyu Luo. 2024. ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12174–12200, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering (Wu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.710.pdf