ChartReasoner: Code-Driven Modality Bridging for Long-Chain Reasoning in Chart Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jia, Caijun, Xu, Nan, Wei, Jingxuan, Wang, Qingli, Wang, Lei, Yu, Bihui, Zhu, Junnan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jia, Caijun
Xu, Nan
Wei, Jingxuan
Wang, Qingli
Wang, Lei
Yu, Bihui
Zhu, Junnan
author_facet Jia, Caijun
Xu, Nan
Wei, Jingxuan
Wang, Qingli
Wang, Lei
Yu, Bihui
Zhu, Junnan
contents Recently, large language models have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities through long-chain reasoning before responding. However, how to extend this capability to visual reasoning tasks remains an open challenge. Existing multimodal reasoning approaches transfer such visual reasoning task into textual reasoning task via several image-to-text conversions, which often lose critical structural and semantic information embedded in visualizations, especially for tasks like chart question answering that require a large amount of visual details. To bridge this gap, we propose ChartReasoner, a code-driven novel two-stage framework designed to enable precise, interpretable reasoning over charts. We first train a high-fidelity model to convert diverse chart images into structured ECharts codes, preserving both layout and data semantics as lossless as possible. Then, we design a general chart reasoning data synthesis pipeline, which leverages this pretrained transport model to automatically and scalably generate chart reasoning trajectories and utilizes a code validator to filter out low-quality samples. Finally, we train the final multimodal model using a combination of supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on our synthesized chart reasoning dataset and experimental results on four public benchmarks clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ChartReasoner. It can preserve the original details of the charts as much as possible and perform comparably with state-of-the-art open-source models while using fewer parameters, approaching the performance of proprietary systems like GPT-4o in out-of-domain settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10116
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChartReasoner: Code-Driven Modality Bridging for Long-Chain Reasoning in Chart Question Answering
Jia, Caijun
Xu, Nan
Wei, Jingxuan
Wang, Qingli
Wang, Lei
Yu, Bihui
Zhu, Junnan
Computation and Language
Recently, large language models have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities through long-chain reasoning before responding. However, how to extend this capability to visual reasoning tasks remains an open challenge. Existing multimodal reasoning approaches transfer such visual reasoning task into textual reasoning task via several image-to-text conversions, which often lose critical structural and semantic information embedded in visualizations, especially for tasks like chart question answering that require a large amount of visual details. To bridge this gap, we propose ChartReasoner, a code-driven novel two-stage framework designed to enable precise, interpretable reasoning over charts. We first train a high-fidelity model to convert diverse chart images into structured ECharts codes, preserving both layout and data semantics as lossless as possible. Then, we design a general chart reasoning data synthesis pipeline, which leverages this pretrained transport model to automatically and scalably generate chart reasoning trajectories and utilizes a code validator to filter out low-quality samples. Finally, we train the final multimodal model using a combination of supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on our synthesized chart reasoning dataset and experimental results on four public benchmarks clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ChartReasoner. It can preserve the original details of the charts as much as possible and perform comparably with state-of-the-art open-source models while using fewer parameters, approaching the performance of proprietary systems like GPT-4o in out-of-domain settings.
title ChartReasoner: Code-Driven Modality Bridging for Long-Chain Reasoning in Chart Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10116