Is this chart lying to me? Automating the detection of misleading visualizations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tonglet, Jonathan, Zimny, Jan, Tuytelaars, Tinne, Gurevych, Iryna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tonglet, Jonathan
Zimny, Jan
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Tonglet, Jonathan
Zimny, Jan
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Misleading visualizations are a potent driver of misinformation on social media and the web. By violating chart design principles, they distort data and lead readers to draw inaccurate conclusions. Prior work has shown that both humans and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are frequently deceived by such visualizations. Automatically detecting misleading visualizations and identifying the specific design rules they violate could help protect readers and reduce the spread of misinformation. However, the training and evaluation of AI models has been limited by the absence of large, diverse, and openly available datasets. In this work, we introduce Misviz, a benchmark of 2,604 real-world visualizations annotated with 12 types of misleaders. To support model training, we also create Misviz-synth, a synthetic dataset of 57,665 visualizations generated using Matplotlib and based on real-world data tables. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on both datasets using state-of-the-art MLLMs, rule-based systems, and image-axis classifiers. Our results reveal that the task remains highly challenging. We release Misviz, Misviz-synth, and the accompanying code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21675
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is this chart lying to me? Automating the detection of misleading visualizations
Tonglet, Jonathan
Zimny, Jan
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Misleading visualizations are a potent driver of misinformation on social media and the web. By violating chart design principles, they distort data and lead readers to draw inaccurate conclusions. Prior work has shown that both humans and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are frequently deceived by such visualizations. Automatically detecting misleading visualizations and identifying the specific design rules they violate could help protect readers and reduce the spread of misinformation. However, the training and evaluation of AI models has been limited by the absence of large, diverse, and openly available datasets. In this work, we introduce Misviz, a benchmark of 2,604 real-world visualizations annotated with 12 types of misleaders. To support model training, we also create Misviz-synth, a synthetic dataset of 57,665 visualizations generated using Matplotlib and based on real-world data tables. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on both datasets using state-of-the-art MLLMs, rule-based systems, and image-axis classifiers. Our results reveal that the task remains highly challenging. We release Misviz, Misviz-synth, and the accompanying code.
title Is this chart lying to me? Automating the detection of misleading visualizations
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21675