@inproceedings{zhang-liao-2026-aligned,
title = "Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation",
author = "Zhang, Zhihan and
Liao, Lizi",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.943/",
pages = "20585--20611",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Chart-to-code generation converts a chart image into an executable plotting script, enabling faithful reproduction and editable visualizations. Existing methods are largely Python-centric, limiting practical use and overlooking a critical source of supervision: the same chart can be expressed by semantically equivalent scripts in different plotting languages. To fill this gap, we introduce Chart2NCode, a dataset of 176K charts paired with aligned scripts in Python, R, and LaTeX that render visually equivalent outputs, constructed via a metadata-to-template pipeline with rendering verification and human quality checks. Building on a LLaVA-style architecture, we further propose CharLuMA, a parameter-efficient adaptation module that augments the multimodal projector with a language-conditioned mixture of low-rank subspaces, allowing the model to share core chart understanding while specializing code generation to the target language through lightweight routing. Extensive experiments show consistent gains in executability and visual fidelity across all languages, outperforming strong open-source baselines and remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Further analyses reveal that balanced multi-language supervision benefits all languages and that the adapter allocates a compact shared core plus language-specific capacity."
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<abstract>Chart-to-code generation converts a chart image into an executable plotting script, enabling faithful reproduction and editable visualizations. Existing methods are largely Python-centric, limiting practical use and overlooking a critical source of supervision: the same chart can be expressed by semantically equivalent scripts in different plotting languages. To fill this gap, we introduce Chart2NCode, a dataset of 176K charts paired with aligned scripts in Python, R, and LaTeX that render visually equivalent outputs, constructed via a metadata-to-template pipeline with rendering verification and human quality checks. Building on a LLaVA-style architecture, we further propose CharLuMA, a parameter-efficient adaptation module that augments the multimodal projector with a language-conditioned mixture of low-rank subspaces, allowing the model to share core chart understanding while specializing code generation to the target language through lightweight routing. Extensive experiments show consistent gains in executability and visual fidelity across all languages, outperforming strong open-source baselines and remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Further analyses reveal that balanced multi-language supervision benefits all languages and that the adapter allocates a compact shared core plus language-specific capacity.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation
%A Zhang, Zhihan
%A Liao, Lizi
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F zhang-liao-2026-aligned
%X Chart-to-code generation converts a chart image into an executable plotting script, enabling faithful reproduction and editable visualizations. Existing methods are largely Python-centric, limiting practical use and overlooking a critical source of supervision: the same chart can be expressed by semantically equivalent scripts in different plotting languages. To fill this gap, we introduce Chart2NCode, a dataset of 176K charts paired with aligned scripts in Python, R, and LaTeX that render visually equivalent outputs, constructed via a metadata-to-template pipeline with rendering verification and human quality checks. Building on a LLaVA-style architecture, we further propose CharLuMA, a parameter-efficient adaptation module that augments the multimodal projector with a language-conditioned mixture of low-rank subspaces, allowing the model to share core chart understanding while specializing code generation to the target language through lightweight routing. Extensive experiments show consistent gains in executability and visual fidelity across all languages, outperforming strong open-source baselines and remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Further analyses reveal that balanced multi-language supervision benefits all languages and that the adapter allocates a compact shared core plus language-specific capacity.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.943/
%P 20585-20611
Markdown (Informal)
[Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.943/) (Zhang & Liao, ACL 2026)
ACL