ChartDiff：大规模图表对比理解基准
提出ChartDiff，包含8,541对跨图表对比摘要的数据集，标注由LLM生成并经人工校验，覆盖多种数据源、图表类型与风格。基准评测通用、图表专用与流水线方法，发现通用模型在GPT评估上表现最好，而专用/流水线方法虽ROUGE更高却与人工评分不一致，表明词汇重叠不能代表真实质量；多序列图仍具挑战性，端到端模型对绘图库差异较鲁棒。该基准推动多图表比较理解研究。
原文内容
arXiv:2603.28902v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Charts are central to analytical reasoning, yet existing benchmarks for chart understanding focus almost exclusively on single-chart interpretation rather than comparative reasoning across multiple charts. To address this gap, we introduce ChartDiff, the first large-scale benchmark for cross-chart comparative summarization. ChartDiff consists of 8,541 chart pairs spanning diverse data sources, chart types, and visual styles, each annotated with LLM-generated and human-verified summaries describing differences in trends, fluctuations, and anomalies. Using ChartDiff, we evaluate general-purpose, chart-specialized, and pipeline-based models. Our results show that frontier general-purpose models achieve the highest GPT-based quality, while specialized and pipeline-based methods obtain higher ROUGE scores but lower human-aligned evaluation, revealing a clear mismatch between lexical overlap and actual summary quality. We further find that multi-series charts remain challenging across model families, whereas strong end-to-end models are relatively robust to differences in plotting libraries. Overall, our findings demonstrate that comparative chart reasoning remains a significant challenge for current vision-language models and position ChartDiff as a new benchmark for advancing research on multi-chart understanding.
Abstract: Charts are central to analytical reasoning, yet existing benchmarks for chart understanding focus almost exclusively on single-chart interpretation rather than comparative reasoning across multiple charts. To address this gap, we introduce ChartDiff, the first large-scale benchmark for cross-chart comparative summarization. ChartDiff consists of 8,541 chart pairs spanning diverse data sources, chart types, and visual styles, each annotated with LLM-generated and human-verified summaries describing differences in trends, fluctuations, and anomalies. Using ChartDiff, we evaluate general-purpose, chart-specialized, and pipeline-based models. Our results show that frontier general-purpose models achieve the highest GPT-based quality, while specialized and pipeline-based methods obtain higher ROUGE scores but lower human-aligned evaluation, revealing a clear mismatch between lexical overlap and actual summary quality. We further find that multi-series charts remain challenging across model families, whereas strong end-to-end models are relatively robust to differences in plotting libraries. Overall, our findings demonstrate that comparative chart reasoning remains a significant challenge for current vision-language models and position ChartDiff as a new benchmark for advancing research on multi-chart understanding.