ChartAgent: A Multimodal Agent for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Complex Chart Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kaur, Rachneet, Srishankar, Nishan, Zeng, Zhen, Ganesh, Sumitra, Veloso, Manuela
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kaur, Rachneet
Srishankar, Nishan
Zeng, Zhen
Ganesh, Sumitra
Veloso, Manuela
author_facet Kaur, Rachneet
Srishankar, Nishan
Zeng, Zhen
Ganesh, Sumitra
Veloso, Manuela
contents Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart's spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieves the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04514
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChartAgent: A Multimodal Agent for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Complex Chart Question Answering
Kaur, Rachneet
Srishankar, Nishan
Zeng, Zhen
Ganesh, Sumitra
Veloso, Manuela
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Methodology
Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart's spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieves the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.
title ChartAgent: A Multimodal Agent for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Complex Chart Question Answering
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04514