# ChartM3: Benchmarking Chart Editing with Multimodal Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (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)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00997/) (2019)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)
- [Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10973/) (2023)
- [ChartMimic: Evaluating LMM's Cross-Modal Reasoning Capability via Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09961/) (2024)
- [ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06598/) (2025)
- [OpenCQA: Open-ended Question Answering with Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06628/) (2022)
- [ChartReformer: Natural Language-Driven Chart Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00209/) (2024)
- [RefChartQA: Grounding Visual Answer on Chart Images through Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23131/) (2025)
- [Efficient LLaMA-3.2-Vision by Trimming Cross-attended Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00557/) (2025)
- [Chart-HQA: A Benchmark for Hypothetical Question Answering in Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04095/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [VinciCoder: Unifying Multimodal Code Generation via Coarse-to-fine Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00391/) (2025)
- [Breaking the SFT Plateau: Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning for Chart-to-Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13587/) (2025)
- [ChartE3: A Comprehensive Benchmark for End-to-End Chart Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21694/) (2026)
- [AnnoBench: A Benchmark for Visualization Annotation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25911/) (2026)
- [Edit2TikZ: A Comprehensive and Challenging Benchmark for Scientific Figure Editing with TikZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13441/) (2026)
- [ChartAnno: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Chart Annotation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03464/) (2026)
- [REChart: Reasoning-Efficient Chart Editing with Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17414/) (2026)
- [Charts Are Beyond Pixels: Probing for Layer-Wise Chart Understanding and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08657/) (2026)
- [ChartRevise: A Dataset and Evaluation Protocol for Exact Chart Editing via Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38642/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Charts are a fundamental visualization format widely used in data analysis across research and industry. While enabling users to edit charts based on high-level intentions is of great practical value, existing methods primarily rely on natural language instructions, which are often too ambiguous to support fine-grained editing. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for multimodal chart editing, where user intent is expressed through a combination of natural language and visual indicators that explicitly highlight the elements to be modified. To support this paradigm, we present ChartM3, a new benchmark for Multimodal chart editing with Multi-level complexity and Multi-perspective evaluation. ChartM3 contains 1,000 samples spanning four levels of editing difficulty. Each sample includes triplets in the form of (chart, code, multimodal instructions). To comprehensively evaluate chart editing models, ChartM3 provides metrics that assess both visual appearance and code correctness. Our benchmark reveals significant limitations in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including GPT-4o, particularly in their ability to interpret and act on visual indicators. To address this, we construct ChartM3-Train, a large-scale training set with 24,000 multimodal chart editing samples. Fine-tuning MLLMs on this dataset leads to substantial improvements, demonstrating the importance of multimodal supervision in building practical chart editing systems. Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/MLrollIT/ChartM3. %https://github.com/MLrollIT/ChartM3Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/yaolinli/VCE.