ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension

Duo Xu, Hao Cheng, Xin Lin, Zhen Xie, Hao Henry Wang


Abstract
Complex chart understanding tasks demand advanced visual recognition and reasoning capabilities from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current research provides limited coverage of complex chart scenarios and computation-intensive reasoning tasks prevalent in real-world applications. This study proposes an automated multi-stage code-driven pipeline for systematically generating visual reasoning datasets to address these limitations. The pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve professional chart templates and employs chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies to generate reasoning codes that simulate real data distributions, thereby driving chart rendering and question-related statistical computations. Through model-based evaluation, the pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality. Using this framework, we construct ChartM3, a multi-dimensional and multi-step dataset containing 38K charts and 142K Q&A pairs for training, along with 2,871 high-quality evaluation samples for enabling practical performance assessment. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities and cross-domain generalization performance, enabling smaller models to achieve performance comparable to larger-scale models in complex chart comprehension.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.701
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
13046–13068
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.701/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Duo Xu, Hao Cheng, Xin Lin, Zhen Xie, and Hao Henry Wang. 2025. ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 13046–13068, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension (Xu et al., Findings 2025)
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