# MSG-Chart: Multimodal Scene Graph for ChartQA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09662/) (2022)
- [VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05356/) (2023)
- [Graphix-T5: Mixing Pre-Trained Transformers with Graph-Aware Layers for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07507/) (2023)
- [Unbiased Heterogeneous Scene Graph Generation with Relation-aware Message Passing Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00443/) (2022)
- [VICTR: Visual Information Captured Text Representation for Text-to-Image Multimodal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03182/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Graph-Based Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Chart Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04303/) (2025)
- [Can AI agents understand spoken conversations about data visualizations in online meetings?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00245/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic Chart Question Answering (ChartQA) is challenging due to the complex distribution of chart elements with patterns of the underlying data not explicitly displayed in charts. To address this challenge, we design a joint multimodal scene graph for charts to explicitly represent the relationships between chart elements and their patterns. Our proposed multimodal scene graph includes a visual graph and a textual graph to jointly capture the structural and semantical knowledge from the chart. This graph module can be easily integrated with different vision transformers as inductive bias. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating the proposed graph module enhances the understanding of charts' elements' structure and semantics, thereby improving performance on publicly available benchmarks, ChartQA and OpenCQA.