# ChartQA-X: Generating Explanations for Visual Chart Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13275/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [e-SNLI: Natural Language Inference with Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01193/) (2018)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02361/) (2019)
- [DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08163/) (2018)
- [Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17146/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Reformulating Unsupervised Style Transfer as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05700/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08129/) (2018)
- [ROSCOE: A Suite of Metrics for Scoring Step-by-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07919/) (2022)
- [Generating Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08507/) (2016)
- [WT5?! Training Text-to-Text Models to Explain their Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14546/) (2020)
- [e-ViL: A Dataset and Benchmark for Natural Language Explanations in Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03761/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Chart-RVR: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Explainable Chart Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10973/) (2025)
- [FinCriticalED: A Visual Benchmark for Financial Fact-Level OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14998/) (2025)
- [Think with Structured Grounding: Perceptual Reinforcement Learning for Chart and Visual-Tabular Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22429/) (2026)
- [InfoCausalQA:Can Models Perform Non-explicit Causal Reasoning Based on Infographic?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06220/) (2025)
- [Benchmark It Yourself (BIY): Preparing a Dataset and Benchmarking AI Models for Scatterplot-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06071/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08291/) (2026)
- [Structure-Token Evidence-Anchored Reasoning for Scientific Chart Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13267/) (2026)
- [Monitorable Chart Reasoning Agents via Verifiable Process Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24071/) (2026)
- [BIRD: Distilling Decision Boundaries into Rationales for MLLM Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33713/) (2026)
- [Do you "see" what I "see"? A Multi-panel Visual Question Answer Dataset for Large Language Model Chart Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14173/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to explain complex information from chart images is vital for effective data-driven decision-making. In this work, we address the challenge of generating detailed explanations alongside answering questions about charts. We present ChartQA-X, a comprehensive dataset comprising 30,799 chart samples across four chart types, each paired with contextually relevant questions, answers, and explanations. Explanations are generated and selected based on metrics such as faithfulness, informativeness, coherence, and perplexity. Our human evaluation with 245 participants shows that model-generated explanations in ChartQA-X surpass human-written explanations in accuracy and logic and are comparable in terms of clarity and overall quality. Moreover, models fine-tuned on ChartQA-X show substantial improvements across various metrics, including absolute gains of up to 24.57 points in explanation quality, 18.96 percentage points in question-answering accuracy, and 14.75 percentage points on unseen benchmarks for the same task. By integrating explanatory narratives with answers, our approach enables agents to convey complex visual information more effectively, improving comprehension and greater trust in the generated responses.