MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning

Fuxiao Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Jianshu Chen, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Yaser Yacoob, Dong Yu


Abstract
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) and their integration into large multimodal models (LMMs), there has beenimpressive progress in zero-shot completion of user-oriented vision-language tasks. However, a gap remains in the domain of chartimage understanding due to the distinct abstract components in charts. To address this, we introduce a large-scale MultiModal ChartInstruction (MMC-Instruction) dataset comprising 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types. Leveraging this data, we de-velop MultiModal Chart Assistant (MMCA), an LMM that achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive evaluation of LMM chart understanding, we also propose a MultiModal Chart Benchmark (MMC-Benchmark), a comprehensive human-annotated benchmark with nine distinct tasks evaluating reasoning capabilities over charts.Extensive experiments on MMC-Benchmark reveal the limitations of existing LMMs on correctly interpreting charts, even for the mostrecent GPT-4V model. Our work provides an instruction-tuning methodology and benchmark to advance multimodal understanding ofcharts. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FuxiaoLiu/MMC.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1287–1310
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.70
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fuxiao Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Jianshu Chen, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Yaser Yacoob, and Dong Yu. 2024. MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1287–1310, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning (Liu et al., NAACL 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.70.pdf
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