Are Large Vision Language Models up to the Challenge of Chart Comprehension and Reasoning
Mohammed Saidul Islam, Raian Rahman, Ahmed Masry, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Enamul Hoque · 2024
Natural language is a powerful complementary modality of communication for data visualizations, such as bar and line charts.To facilitate chart-based reasoning using natural language, various downstream tasks have been introduced recently such as chart question answering, chart summarization, and fact-checking with charts.These tasks pose a unique challenge, demanding both vision-language reasoning and a nuanced understanding of chart data tables, visual encodings, and natural language instructions.Despite the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse NLP tasks, their abilities and limitations in the realm of data visualization remain under-explored, possibly due to their lack of multi-modal capabilities.To bridge the gap, this paper presents one of the first comprehensive evaluations of the recently developed large vision language models (LVLMs) for chart understanding and reasoning tasks.Our evaluation includes a comprehensive assessment of both closed and opensourced LVLMs across five major chart reasoning tasks.Furthermore, we perform a qualitative evaluation of LVLMs' performance on a diverse range of charts, aiming to provide a thorough analysis.Our findings reveal that while LVLMs demonstrate impressive abilities in generating fluent texts covering high-level data insights, they also encounter common problems like hallucinations, factual errors, and data bias.We highlight the key strengths and limitations of LVLMs in chart comprehension tasks, offering insights for future research 1 .* Equal contribution. 1 We make all our prompts as well as LVLMs' responses open source here. Chart Question-AnsweringSummary: The first two cases of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy were recorded between the end of January and the beginning of February 2020 .As of January 5 , 2021 , there were 569,161 thousand active coronavirus cases in the country .The highest figure was recorded on November 22 , 2020 , when the number of active coronavirus cases was equal to 805,947 .Also , the total number of cases (including active cases , recoveries , and deaths) in Italy surpassed 2.1 million .Question: What's the sum of median value of blue and green graph?Answer: 87.5 Chart Summarization Question:Compare the Democrats and Republicans views about providing healthcare to the Population Answer: While 83% of Democrats say providing high quality, affordable healthcare for all should be top priority, a much smaller share of Republicans (48%) agree. Open-ended Chart Question-AnsweringStatement: Ea patras is the only club to be established before 1900