# Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/

## Key facts

- Cited by 169 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [TextCaps: a Dataset for Image Captioning with Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12462/) (2020)
- [Character Region Awareness for Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01941/) (2019)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [VinVL: Revisiting Visual Representations in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00529/) (2021)
- [Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10404/) (2020)
- [Chart-to-Text: Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Charts by Adapting the Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09142/) (2020)
- [SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11624/) (2021)
- [Plan-then-Generate: Controlled Data-to-Text Generation via Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13740/) (2021)
- [Logic2Text: High-Fidelity Natural Language Generation from Logical Forms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14579/) (2020)
- [Accessible Visualization via Natural Language Descriptions: A Four-Level Model of Semantic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04406/) (2021)
- [What to talk about and how? Selective Generation using LSTMs with Coarse-to-Fine Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00838/) (2015)
- [Figure Captioning with Reasoning and Sequence-Level Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02850/) (2019)
- [DataSite: Proactive Visual Data Exploration with Computation of Insight-based Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08621/) (2018)
- [Towards Understanding How Readers Integrate Charts and Captions: A Case Study with Line Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08235/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 169)

- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12895/) (2024)
- [Data-centric Artificial Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10158/) (2023)
- [VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05211/) (2024)
- [ChartLlama: A Multimodal LLM for Chart Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16483/) (2023)
- [DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10505/) (2022)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10774/) (2023)
- [MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09662/) (2022)
- [ChartMimic: Evaluating LMM's Cross-Modal Reasoning Capability via Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09961/) (2024)
- [ChartX & ChartVLM: A Versatile Benchmark and Foundation Model for Complicated Chart Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12185/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18486/) (2023)
- [ChartBench: A Benchmark for Complex Visual Reasoning in Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15915/) (2023)
- [VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05356/) (2023)
- [Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15368/) (2025)
- [ChartQAPro: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05506/) (2025)
- [ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06598/) (2025)
- [PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14528/) (2025)
- [MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13046/) (2024)
- [ChartAssisstant: A Universal Chart Multimodal Language Model via Chart-to-Table Pre-training and Multitask Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02384/) (2024)
- [ChartGemma: Visual Instruction-tuning for Chart Reasoning in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04172/) (2024)
- [Is GPT-4 a Good Data Analyst?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15038/) (2023)
- [Eagle 2: Building Post-Training Data Strategies from Scratch for Frontier Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14818/) (2025)
- [ChartInstruct: Instruction Tuning for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09028/) (2024)
- [OpenCQA: Open-ended Question Answering with Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06628/) (2022)
- [Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23606/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Insights: A Survey on Automatic Chart Understanding in the Era of Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12027/) (2024)
- [SmolDocling: An ultra-compact vision-language model for end-to-end multi-modal document conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11576/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Charts are commonly used for exploring data and communicating insights. Generating natural language summaries from charts can be very helpful for people in inferring key insights that would otherwise require a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. We present Chart-to-text, a large-scale benchmark with two datasets and a total of 44,096 charts covering a wide range of topics and chart types. We explain the dataset construction process and analyze the datasets. We also introduce a number of state-of-the-art neural models as baselines that utilize image captioning and data-to-text generation techniques to tackle two problem variations: one assumes the underlying data table of the chart is available while the other needs to extract data from chart images. Our analysis with automatic and human evaluation shows that while our best models usually generate fluent summaries and yield reasonable BLEU scores, they also suffer from hallucinations and factual errors as well as difficulties in correctly explaining complex patterns and trends in charts.