# Generalization of CNNs on Relational Reasoning with Bar Charts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00086 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00086/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [AutoML: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00709/) (2019)
- [A simple neural network module for relational reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01427/) (2017)
- [DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08163/) (2018)
- [PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00997/) (2019)
- [FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07300/) (2017)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08750/) (2018)
- [Partial success in closing the gap between human and machine vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07411/) (2021)
- [Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/) (2022)
- [MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10774/) (2023)
- [ChartAssisstant: A Universal Chart Multimodal Language Model via Chart-to-Table Pre-training and Multitask Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02384/) (2024)
- [VizML: A Machine Learning Approach to Visualization Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04819/) (2018)
- [Towards Automated Infographic Design: Deep Learning-based Auto-Extraction of Extensible Timeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13550/) (2019)
- [LineCap: Line Charts for Data Visualization Captioning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07243/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Readability of Force Directed Graph Layouts: A Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00703/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Do Language Model Agents Align with Humans in Rating Visualizations? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06702/) (2025)
- [A Rigorous Behavior Assessment of CNNs Using a Data-Domain Sampling Regime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03866/) (2025)
- [PaCoNet: Deep Data Extraction for Parallel Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06030/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a systematic study of the generalization of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and humans on relational reasoning tasks with bar charts. We first revisit previous experiments on graphical perception and update the benchmark performance of CNNs. We then test the generalization performance of CNNs on a classic relational reasoning task: estimating bar length ratios in a bar chart, by progressively perturbing the standard visualizations. We further conduct a user study to compare the performance of CNNs and humans. Our results show that CNNs outperform humans only when the training and test data have the same visual encodings. Otherwise, they may perform worse. We also find that CNNs are sensitive to perturbations in various visual encodings, regardless of their relevance to the target bars. Yet, humans are mainly influenced by bar lengths. Our study suggests that robust relational reasoning with visualizations is challenging for CNNs. Improving CNNs' generalization performance may require training them to better recognize task-related visual properties.