mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Visual Self-Refine: A Pixel-Guided Paradigm for Accurate Chart Parsing

arXiv 2602.16455 ↗First posted 18 Feb 2026cs.CVcited by 5

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Chart understanding and anomaly detection

Abstract (arXiv)

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities for reasoning and self-correction at the textual level, these strengths provide minimal benefits for complex tasks centered on visual perception, such as Chart Parsing. Existing models often struggle with visually dense charts, leading to errors like data omission, misalignment, and hallucination. Inspired by the human strategy of using a finger as a ``visual anchor'' to ensure accuracy when reading complex charts, we propose a new paradigm named Visual Self-Refine (VSR). The core idea of VSR is to enable a model to generate pixel-level localization outputs, visualize them, and then feed these visualizations back to itself, allowing it to intuitively inspect and correct its own potential visual perception errors. We instantiate the VSR paradigm in the domain of Chart Parsing by proposing ChartVSR. This model decomposes the parsing process into two stages: a Refine Stage, where it iteratively uses visual feedback to ensure the accuracy of all data points' Pixel-level Localizations, and a Decode Stage, where it uses these verified localizations as precise visual anchors to parse the final structured data. To address the limitations of existing benchmarks, we also construct ChartP-Bench, a new and highly challenging benchmark for chart parsing. Our work also highlights VSR as a general-purpose visual feedback mechanism, offering a promising new direction for enhancing accuracy on a wide range of vision-centric tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 56 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2026.

Builds on

56 of 68 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024CharXiv: Charting Gaps in Realistic Chart Understanding in Multimodal LLMs26 Jun
  2. 2024Chart-based Reasoning: Transferring Capabilities from LLMs to VLMs19 Mar
  3. 2024ChartX & ChartVLM: A Versatile Benchmark and Foundation Model for Complicated Chart Reasoning19 Feb
  4. 2024ChartAssisstant: A Universal Chart Multimodal Language Model via Chart-to-Table Pre-training and Multitask Instruction Tuning4 Jan
  5. 2023ChartBench: A Benchmark for Complex Visual Reasoning in Charts26 Dec
  6. 2023ChartLlama: A Multimodal LLM for Chart Understanding and Generation27 Nov
  7. 2022MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering19 Dec

Other references · 49

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  31. 2025ARM-Thinker: Reinforcing Multimodal Generative Reward Models with Agentic Tool Use and Visual Reasoningcited by 13
  32. 2025On the Perception Bottleneck of VLMs for Chart Understandingcited by 9
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025EncQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Visual Encodings for Charts
  2. 2023ChartReader: A Unified Framework for Chart Derendering and Comprehension without Heuristic Rules
  3. 2025Improved Iterative Refinement for Chart-to-Code Generation via Structured Instruction
  4. 2025Visual Programmability: A Guide for Code-as-Thought in Chart Understanding
  5. 2025RefChartQA: Grounding Visual Answer on Chart Images through Instruction Tuning
  6. 2025ChartAB: A Benchmark for Chart Grounding & Dense Alignment
  7. 2025ChartAgent: A Chart Understanding Framework with Tool Integrated Reasoning
  8. 2024ChartGemma: Visual Instruction-tuning for Chart Reasoning in the Wild