# Deploying Tiny LVLM Judges for Real-World Evaluation of Chart Models: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07545/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Chart understanding and anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/chart-understanding-and-anomaly-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04788/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)
- [Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07666/) (2024)
- [Arcee's MergeKit: A Toolkit for Merging Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13257/) (2024)
- [Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/) (2022)
- [UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14761/) (2023)
- [Prometheus-Vision: Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Fine-Grained Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06591/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18486/) (2023)
- [ChartQAPro: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05506/) (2025)
- [A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04069/) (2024)
- [ChartGemma: Visual Instruction-tuning for Chart Reasoning in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04172/) (2024)
- [OpenCQA: Open-ended Question Answering with Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06628/) (2022)
- [WSL-DS: Weakly Supervised Learning with Distant Supervision for Query Focused Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01421/) (2020)
- [Improving Automatic Evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Biomedical Relation Extraction via LLMs-as-the-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00777/) (2025)
- [Text2Vis: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Generating Multimodal Visualizations from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19969/) (2025)
- [Judging the Judges: Can Large Vision-Language Models Fairly Evaluate Chart Comprehension and Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08468/) (2025)
- [Query-OPT: Optimizing Inference of Large Language Models via Multi-Query Instructions in Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00067/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Effectiveness of Cost-Efficient Large Language Models in Benchmark Biomedical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with only 7B parameters have shown promise as automated judges in chart comprehension tasks. However, tiny models (<=2B parameters) still perform poorly as judges, limiting their real-world use in resource-constrained settings. To address this, we propose two approaches to ensure cost-efficient evaluation: (i) multi-criteria prompting, which combines separate evaluation criteria into a single query, and (ii) domain-adaptive transfer learning, in which we fine-tune a 2B-parameter LVLM on synthetic judgments in a chart dataset to create the ChartJudge. Experiments show that multi-criteria prompting exposes robustness gaps, which led to a huge drop in performance for 7B models, including specialized LVLM judges like LLaVA-Critic. In addition, we find that our tiny LVLM (ChartJudge) can effectively transfer knowledge from one dataset to another to make it a more specialized model. Our fine-grained analysis across chart types and query complexities offers actionable insights into trade-offs between model size, prompt design, and transferability, enabling scalable, low-cost evaluation for chart reasoning tasks.