How Aligned are Human Chart Takeaways and LLM Predictions? A Case Study on Bar Charts with Varying Layouts

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Huichen Will, Hoffswell, Jane, Thane, Sao Myat Thazin, Bursztyn, Victor S., Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Wang, Huichen Will
Hoffswell, Jane
Thane, Sao Myat Thazin
Bursztyn, Victor S.
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
author_facet Wang, Huichen Will
Hoffswell, Jane
Thane, Sao Myat Thazin
Bursztyn, Victor S.
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted for a variety of visualizations tasks, but how far are we from perceptually aware LLMs that can predict human takeaways? Graphical perception literature has shown that human chart takeaways are sensitive to visualization design choices, such as spatial layouts. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs exhibit such sensitivity when generating takeaways, using bar charts with varying spatial layouts as a case study. We conducted three experiments and tested four common bar chart layouts: vertically juxtaposed, horizontally juxtaposed, overlaid, and stacked. In Experiment 1, we identified the optimal configurations to generate meaningful chart takeaways by testing four LLMs, two temperature settings, nine chart specifications, and two prompting strategies. We found that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggled to generate semantically diverse and factually accurate takeaways. In Experiment 2, we used the optimal configurations to generate 30 chart takeaways each for eight visualizations across four layouts and two datasets in both zero-shot and one-shot settings. Compared to human takeaways, we found that the takeaways LLMs generated often did not match the types of comparisons made by humans. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of chart context and data on LLM takeaways. We found that LLMs, unlike humans, exhibited variation in takeaway comparison types for different bar charts using the same bar layout. Overall, our case study evaluates the ability of LLMs to emulate human interpretations of data and points to challenges and opportunities in using LLMs to predict human chart takeaways.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Aligned are Human Chart Takeaways and LLM Predictions? A Case Study on Bar Charts with Varying Layouts
Wang, Huichen Will
Hoffswell, Jane
Thane, Sao Myat Thazin
Bursztyn, Victor S.
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
Human-Computer Interaction
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted for a variety of visualizations tasks, but how far are we from perceptually aware LLMs that can predict human takeaways? Graphical perception literature has shown that human chart takeaways are sensitive to visualization design choices, such as spatial layouts. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs exhibit such sensitivity when generating takeaways, using bar charts with varying spatial layouts as a case study. We conducted three experiments and tested four common bar chart layouts: vertically juxtaposed, horizontally juxtaposed, overlaid, and stacked. In Experiment 1, we identified the optimal configurations to generate meaningful chart takeaways by testing four LLMs, two temperature settings, nine chart specifications, and two prompting strategies. We found that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggled to generate semantically diverse and factually accurate takeaways. In Experiment 2, we used the optimal configurations to generate 30 chart takeaways each for eight visualizations across four layouts and two datasets in both zero-shot and one-shot settings. Compared to human takeaways, we found that the takeaways LLMs generated often did not match the types of comparisons made by humans. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of chart context and data on LLM takeaways. We found that LLMs, unlike humans, exhibited variation in takeaway comparison types for different bar charts using the same bar layout. Overall, our case study evaluates the ability of LLMs to emulate human interpretations of data and points to challenges and opportunities in using LLMs to predict human chart takeaways.
title How Aligned are Human Chart Takeaways and LLM Predictions? A Case Study on Bar Charts with Varying Layouts
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06837