VisInteract: Towards Dynamic Interactive Text-to-Visualization under Imperfect Queries

Real-world visualization requests are routinely ambiguous, incomplete, or factually incorrect, yet existing Text-to-Visualization (Text-to-Vis) systems assume well-specified inputs and produce charts in a single pass. When queries are imperfect, a system must interact with the user to recover the true intent, but no benchmark or method supports this dynamic process. We introduce VisInteract, a new paradigm that reframes Text-to-Vis as interaction-driven intent recovery, and VisInteract-Bench, to our knowledge, that is the first benchmark for dynamic interactive Text-to-Vis, featuring controlled imperfection injection, a leakage-controlled User Agent for realistic multi-turn feedback, and dual-perspective (code and chart) automated evaluation. On the algorithmic side, we propose Vis-MCTS, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) enhanced method, introducing improvements over classical MCTS, that Progressive Widening to tame the unbounded tool-argument space in tree search, cross-rollout information sharing so clarifications and critiques benefit the entire search tree, and Dimension-Aware Reward Decomposition that routes scalar user feedback along data-fidelity, visual-design, and intent-alignment dimensions to resolve credit assignment across heterogeneous actions. Extensive Experiments across two LLM backbones show that Vis-MCTS consistently outperforms all Text-to-Vis baselines, improving end-to-end task success by 13.40%--16.27% over the strongest interactive baseline and by more than 5× over non-interactive ones.