# Evaluating LLMs for Visualization Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10996/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07300/) (2017)
- [UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05126/) (2023)
- [LIDA: A Tool for Automatic Generation of Grammar-Agnostic Visualizations and Infographics using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02927/) (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)
- [NL4DV: A Toolkit for Generating Analytic Specifications for Data Visualization from Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10723/) (2020)
- [Towards Natural Language Interfaces for Data Visualization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03506/) (2021)
- [Chat2VIS: Generating Data Visualisations via Natural Language using ChatGPT, Codex and GPT-3 Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02094/) (2023)
- [Data2Vis: Automatic Generation of Data Visualizations Using Sequence to Sequence Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03126/) (2018)
- [AI4VIS: Survey on Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Data Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01330/) (2021)
- [Visualization Generation with Large Language Models: An Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11255/) (2024)
- [Let the Chart Spark: Embedding Semantic Context into Chart with Text-to-Image Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14630/) (2023)
- [Are LLMs ready for Visualization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06158/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Information Visualization has been utilized to gain insights from complex data. In recent times, Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed very well in many tasks. In this paper, we showcase the capabilities of different popular LLMs to generate code for visualization based on simple prompts. We also analyze the power of LLMs to understand some common visualizations by answering simple questions. Our study shows that LLMs could generate code for some visualizations as well as answer questions about them. However, LLMs also have several limitations. We believe that our insights can be used to improve both LLMs and Information Visualization systems.