# DATAREEL: Automated Data-Driven Video Story Generation with Animations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25220 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25220/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02224/) (2023)
- [Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04468/) (2024)
- [AutoAgents: A Framework for Automatic Agent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17288/) (2023)
- [OpenAGI: When LLM Meets Domain Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04370/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Design2Code: Benchmarking Multimodal Code Generation for Automated Front-End Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03163/) (2024)
- [StoryGAN: A Sequential Conditional GAN for Story Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02784/) (2018)
- [VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05356/) (2023)
- [ChartQAPro: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05506/) (2025)
- [RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13304/) (2023)
- [ChartInstruct: Instruction Tuning for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09028/) (2024)
- [RET-LLM: Towards a General Read-Write Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14322/) (2023)
- [OpenCQA: Open-ended Question Answering with Charts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06628/) (2022)
- [Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11843/) (2023)
- [ChartSumm: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Automatic Chart Summarization of Long and Short Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13620/) (2023)
- [Calliope: Automatic Visual Data Story Generation from a Spreadsheet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09975/) (2020)
- [DataNarrative: Automated Data-Driven Storytelling with Visualizations and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05346/) (2024)
- [Creating Suspenseful Stories: Iterative Planning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17119/) (2024)
- [From Data to Story: Towards Automatic Animated Data Video Creation with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03876/) (2024)
- [Data Player: Automatic Generation of Data Videos with Narration-Animation Interplay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04703/) (2023)
- [BigCharts-R1: Enhanced Chart Reasoning with Visual Reinforcement Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09804/) (2025)
- [Text2Vis: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Generating Multimodal Visualizations from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19969/) (2025)
- [Erato: Cooperative Data Story Editing via Fact Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02529/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Chart Deception in Vision-Language Models: From Vulnerability to Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22600/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data videos combine animated visualizations with synchronized narration to communicate quantitative information and are widely used in journalism, education, and public communication. Automatically generating them requires deciding what story to tell, designing effective visualizations, and producing executable animations synchronized with narration. Despite rapid progress in vision-language models (VLMs), it remains unclear how well they can perform this task from a high-level communicative intent, largely because no standardized benchmark exists. We introduce DATAREEL, a benchmark for automated data-driven video story generation containing 328 real-world data reels. Given a data table, a communicative intent, a target duration, and a style reference image, a model must generate executable animation code with synchronized subtitles, which we render and evaluate. Evaluating eight proprietary and open-weight VLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: open-weight models exhibit execution failure rates of up to 39.8%, whereas proprietary models achieve stronger overall performance. Yet even the best-performing models frequently generate static charts, subtitle-animation desynchronization, unstable layouts, and poor adherence to the reference style. We further introduce a strong agentic baseline that decomposes generation into planning, coding, and verification, consistently outperforming direct prompting in both human and automatic evaluations. The task remains far from solved; we release DATAREEL at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DataReel to support future work.