RealChart2Code: Advancing Chart-to-Code Generation with Real Data and Multi-Task Evaluation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation across various domains. However, their ability to replicate complex, multi-panel visualizations from real-world data remains largely unassessed. To address this gap, we introduce textbftextttRealChart2Code, a new large-scale benchmark with over 2,800 instances grounded in authentic datasets and featuring tasks with clear analytical intent. Crucially, it is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate chart generation from large-scale raw data and assess iterative code refinement in a multi-turn conversational setting. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 leading VLMs on textttRealChart2Code reveals significant performance degradation compared to simpler benchmarks, highlighting their struggles with complex plot structures and authentic data. Our analysis uncovers a substantial performance gap between proprietary and open-weight models and confirms that even state-of-the-art VLMs often fail to accurately replicate intricate, multi-panel charts. These findings provide valuable insights into the current limitations of VLMs and guide future research directions. We release the benchmark and code at urlhttps://github.com/Speakn0w/RealChart2Code.