ChartMuseum: Testing Visual Reasoning Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Liyan, Kim, Grace, Zhao, Xinyu, Lake, Thom, Ding, Wenxuan, Yin, Fangcong, Singhal, Prasann, Wadhwa, Manya, Liu, Zeyu Leo, Sprague, Zayne, Namuduri, Ramya, Hu, Bodun, Rodriguez, Juan Diego, Peng, Puyuan, Durrett, Greg
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tang, Liyan
Kim, Grace
Zhao, Xinyu
Lake, Thom
Ding, Wenxuan
Yin, Fangcong
Singhal, Prasann
Wadhwa, Manya
Liu, Zeyu Leo
Sprague, Zayne
Namuduri, Ramya
Hu, Bodun
Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Peng, Puyuan
Durrett, Greg
author_facet Tang, Liyan
Kim, Grace
Zhao, Xinyu
Lake, Thom
Ding, Wenxuan
Yin, Fangcong
Singhal, Prasann
Wadhwa, Manya
Liu, Zeyu Leo
Sprague, Zayne
Namuduri, Ramya
Hu, Bodun
Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Peng, Puyuan
Durrett, Greg
contents Chart understanding presents a unique challenge for large vision-language models (LVLMs), as it requires the integration of sophisticated textual and visual reasoning capabilities. However, current LVLMs exhibit a notable imbalance between these skills, falling short on visual reasoning that is difficult to perform in text. We conduct a case study using a synthetic dataset solvable only through visual reasoning and show that model performance degrades significantly with increasing visual complexity, while human performance remains robust. We then introduce ChartMuseum, a new Chart Question Answering (QA) benchmark containing 1,162 expert-annotated questions spanning multiple reasoning types, curated from real-world charts across 184 sources, specifically built to evaluate complex visual and textual reasoning. Unlike prior chart understanding benchmarks -- where frontier models perform similarly and near saturation -- our benchmark exposes a substantial gap between model and human performance, while effectively differentiating model capabilities: although humans achieve 93% accuracy, the best-performing model Gemini-2.5-Pro attains only 63.0%, and the leading open-source LVLM Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct achieves only 38.5%. Moreover, on questions requiring primarily visual reasoning, all models experience a 35%-55% performance drop from text-reasoning-heavy question performance. Lastly, our qualitative error analysis reveals specific categories of visual reasoning that are challenging for current LVLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChartMuseum: Testing Visual Reasoning Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models
Tang, Liyan
Kim, Grace
Zhao, Xinyu
Lake, Thom
Ding, Wenxuan
Yin, Fangcong
Singhal, Prasann
Wadhwa, Manya
Liu, Zeyu Leo
Sprague, Zayne
Namuduri, Ramya
Hu, Bodun
Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Peng, Puyuan
Durrett, Greg
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Chart understanding presents a unique challenge for large vision-language models (LVLMs), as it requires the integration of sophisticated textual and visual reasoning capabilities. However, current LVLMs exhibit a notable imbalance between these skills, falling short on visual reasoning that is difficult to perform in text. We conduct a case study using a synthetic dataset solvable only through visual reasoning and show that model performance degrades significantly with increasing visual complexity, while human performance remains robust. We then introduce ChartMuseum, a new Chart Question Answering (QA) benchmark containing 1,162 expert-annotated questions spanning multiple reasoning types, curated from real-world charts across 184 sources, specifically built to evaluate complex visual and textual reasoning. Unlike prior chart understanding benchmarks -- where frontier models perform similarly and near saturation -- our benchmark exposes a substantial gap between model and human performance, while effectively differentiating model capabilities: although humans achieve 93% accuracy, the best-performing model Gemini-2.5-Pro attains only 63.0%, and the leading open-source LVLM Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct achieves only 38.5%. Moreover, on questions requiring primarily visual reasoning, all models experience a 35%-55% performance drop from text-reasoning-heavy question performance. Lastly, our qualitative error analysis reveals specific categories of visual reasoning that are challenging for current LVLMs.
title ChartMuseum: Testing Visual Reasoning Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13444