# From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ChartEditBench: Evaluating Grounded Multi-Turn Chart Editing in Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15758/) (2026)
- [Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15932/) (2026)
- [ChartE3: A Comprehensive Benchmark for End-to-End Chart Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21694/) (2026)
- [How Far Are Vision-Language Models from Constructing the Real World? A Benchmark for Physical Generative Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24866/) (2026)
- [DV-World: Benchmarking Data Visualization Agents in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25914/) (2026)
- [DART: Difficulty-Adaptive Routing for Zero-Shot Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00672/) (2026)
- [PPTBench: Can Coding Agents Reconstruct the Visual World through Structured, Editable Slides](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29718/) (2026)
- [ChartAnno: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Chart Annotation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03464/) (2026)
- [Consistency-Driven Co-Evolution for Self-Supervised Cross-Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04926/) (2026)
- [VectorHarness: Recovering Editable, Relation-Preserving Structure from Scientific Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13294/) (2026)
- [Point, Revise, Review: Grounded Agentic Analysis in Reactive Notebooks with marimo-lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19839/) (2026)
- [ChartRevise: A Dataset and Evaluation Protocol for Exact Chart Editing via Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38642/) (2026)
- [VisAudit: Evaluating Multimodal Agents for Visual Diagnosis and Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02399/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the chart understanding and code generation capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). Chart2Code is explicitly designed from a user-driven perspective, capturing diverse real-world scenarios and progressively increasing task difficulty. It consists of three levels: Level 1 (Chart Reproduction) reproduces charts from a reference figure and user query; Level 2 (Chart Editing) involves complex modifications such as changing chart types or adding elements; and Level 3 (Long-Table to Chart Generation) requires models to transform long, information-dense tables into faithful charts following user instructions. To our knowledge, this is the first hierarchical benchmark that reflects practical chart2code usage while systematically scaling task complexity. In total, Chart2Code contains 2,023 tasks across 22 chart types, paired with multi-level evaluation metrics that assess both code correctness and the visual fidelity of rendered charts. We benchmark 25 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LMMs, including both proprietary and the latest open-source models such as GPT-5, Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL3/3.5, MiMo-VL, and Seed-1.6-VL. Experimental results demonstrate that even the SoTA model GPT-5 averages only 0.57 on code-based evaluation and 0.22 on chart-quality assessment across the editing tasks, underscoring the difficulty of Chart2Code. We anticipate this benchmark will drive advances in multimodal reasoning and foster the development of more robust and general-purpose LMMs. Our code and data are available on Chart2Code.