Muye Huang

Muye Huang, Han Lai, Xinyu Zhang et al.

Chart understanding enables automated data analysis for humans, which requires models to achieve highly accurate visual comprehension. While existing Visual Language Models (VLMs) have shown progress in chart understanding, the lack of high-quality training data and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks hinders VLM chart comprehension. In this paper, we introduce EvoChart, a novel self-training method for generating synthetic chart data to enhance VLMs' capabilities in real-world chart comprehension. We also propose EvoChart-QA, a noval benchmark for measuring models' chart comprehension abilities in real-world scenarios. Specifically, EvoChart is a unique self-training data synthesis approach that simultaneously produces high-quality training corpus and a high-performance chart understanding model. EvoChart-QA consists of 650 distinct real-world charts collected from 140 different websites and 1,250 expert-curated questions that focus on chart understanding. Experimental results on various open-source and proprietary VLMs tested on EvoChart-QA demonstrate that even the best proprietary model, GPT-4o, achieves only 49.8% accuracy. Moreover, the EvoChart method significantly boosts the performance of open-source VLMs on real-world chart understanding tasks, achieving 54.2% accuracy on EvoChart-QA.

Muye Huang, Wu Lin, Lingling Zhang et al.

Charts are widely used to present complex data for analysis and decision making. Existing chart understanding benchmarks mainly focus on static charts, but real-world charts are often dynamic and interactive. Key information may only appear after actions such as hovering, clicking, zooming, or dragging. Dynamic chart understanding therefore requires models to identify visible content, choose proper interactions, and reason over changing chart states. To evaluate this ability, we propose ChartAct, an interactive benchmark for dynamic chart understanding. ChartAct collects and filters 673 dynamic charts from 8 real chart websites, covers 7 common chart types, and constructs 1,440 high-quality question-answer samples. Each sample is instantiated in two environments, Dynamic Chart and Dashboard Chart, to evaluate dynamic chart understanding under different contexts. Based on ChartAct, we systematically evaluate 11 advanced multimodal models and GUI agents. Experimental results show that existing models still have clear limitations in dynamic chart understanding. The strongest model, Claude-Opus-4.7, achieves an average success rate of 84.5\%, while most models remain below 60\%. We also conduct detailed failure attribution and case analysis. ChartAct provides a new benchmark for studying chart understanding in real interactive environments. Codes at https://github.com/wulin-wulin/OSWorld_Chart

Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Qiushi Sun et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of navigating complex environments. However, existing evaluations primarily adopt a deductive paradigm, where agents execute tasks based on explicitly provided rules and static goals, often within limited planning horizons. Crucially, this neglects the inductive necessity for agents to discover latent transition laws from experience autonomously, which is the cornerstone for enabling agentic foresight and sustaining strategic coherence. To bridge this gap, we introduce OdysseyArena, which re-centers agent evaluation on long-horizon, active, and inductive interactions. We formalize and instantiate four primitives, translating abstract transition dynamics into concrete interactive environments. Building upon this, we establish OdysseyArena-Lite for standardized benchmarking, providing a set of 120 tasks to measure an agent's inductive efficiency and long-horizon discovery. Pushing further, we introduce OdysseyArena-Challenge to stress-test agent stability across extreme interaction horizons (e.g., > 200 steps). Extensive experiments on 15+ leading LLMs reveal that even frontier models exhibit a deficiency in inductive scenarios, identifying a critical bottleneck in the pursuit of autonomous discovery in complex environments. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/xufangzhi/Odyssey-Arena

Muye Huang, Lingling Zhang, Lai Han et al.

Charts are widely used for data visualization across various fields, including education, research, and business. Chart Question Answering (CQA) is an emerging task focused on the automatic interpretation and reasoning of data presented in charts. However, chart images are inherently difficult to interpret, and chart-related questions often involve complex logical and numerical reasoning, which hinders the performance of existing models. This paper introduces VProChart, a novel framework designed to address these challenges in CQA by integrating a lightweight Visual Perception Alignment Agent (VPAgent) and a Programmatic Solution Reasoning approach. VPAgent aligns and models chart elements based on principles of human visual perception, enhancing the understanding of chart context. The Programmatic Solution Reasoning approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to transform natural language reasoning questions into structured solution programs, facilitating precise numerical and logical reasoning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets such as ChartQA and PlotQA demonstrate that VProChart significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting its capability in understanding and reasoning with charts.

Yifei Li, Weidong Guo, Lingling Zhang et al.

Long-term conversational memory is a core capability for LLM-based dialogue systems, yet existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols primarily focus on surface-level factual recall. In realistic interactions, appropriate responses often depend on implicit constraints such as user state, goals, or values that are not explicitly queried later. To evaluate this setting, we introduce \textbf{LoCoMo-Plus}, a benchmark for assessing cognitive memory under cue--trigger semantic disconnect, where models must retain and apply latent constraints across long conversational contexts. We further show that conventional string-matching metrics and explicit task-type prompting are misaligned with such scenarios, and propose a unified evaluation framework based on constraint consistency. Experiments across diverse backbone models, retrieval-based methods, and memory systems demonstrate that cognitive memory remains challenging and reveals failures not captured by existing benchmarks. Our code and evaluation framework are publicly available at: https://github.com/xjtuleeyf/Locomo-Plus.

Lingling Zhang, Muye Huang, QianYing Wang et al.

Chart Question Answering (CQA) aims at answering questions based on the visual chart content, which plays an important role in chart sumarization, business data analysis, and data report generation. CQA is a challenging multi-modal task because of the strong context dependence and complex reasoning requirement. The former refers to answering this question strictly based on the analysis of the visual content or internal data of the given chart, while the latter emphasizes the various logical and numerical reasoning involved in answer prediction process. In this paper, we pay more attention on the complex reasoning in CQA task, and propose a novel Graph-of-Thought (GoT) guided compositional reasoning model called GoT-CQA to overcome this problem. At first, we transform the chart-oriented question into a directed acyclic GoT composed of multiple operator nodes, including localization, numerical and logical operator. It intuitively reflects the human brain's solution process to this question. After that, we design an efficient auto-compositional reasoning framework guided by the GoT, to excute the multi-step reasoning operations in various types of questions. Comprehensive experiments on ChartQA and PlotQA-D datasets show that GoT-CQA achieves outstanding performance, especially in complex human-written and reasoning questions, comparing with the latest popular baselines.

Muye Huang, Lingling Zhang, Yifei Li et al.

Charts are high-density visual carriers of complex data and medium for information extraction and analysis. Due to the need for precise and complex visual reasoning, automated chart understanding poses a significant challenge to existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many MLLMs trained with reinforcement learning (RL) face the challenge of credit assignment. Their advantage estimation, typically performed at the trajectory level, cannot distinguish between correct and incorrect reasoning steps within a single generated response. To address this limitation, we introduce SketchVL, a novel MLLM that optimized with FinePO, a new RL algorithm designed for fine-grained credit assignment within each trajectory. SketchVL's methodology involves drawing its intermediate reasoning steps as markers on the image and feeding the annotated image back to itself, creating a robust, multi-step reasoning process. During training, the FinePO algorithm leverages a Fine-grained Process Reward Model (FinePRM) to score each drawing action within a trajectory, thereby precisely assigning credit for each step. This mechanism allows FinePO to more strongly reward correct tokens when a trajectory is globally successful, and more heavily penalize incorrect tokens when the trajectory is globally suboptimal, thus achieving fine-grained reinforcement signals. Experiments show that SketchVL learns to align its step-level behavior with the FinePRM, achieving an average performance gain of 7.23\% over its base model across chart datasets, natural image datasets, and mathematics, providing a promising new direction for training powerful reasoning models.

Yifei Li, Lingling Zhang, Hang Yan et al.

Traditional knowledge graph (KG) embedding methods aim to represent entities and relations in a low-dimensional space, primarily focusing on static graphs. However, real-world KGs are dynamically evolving with the constant addition of entities, relations and facts. To address such dynamic nature of KGs, several continual knowledge graph embedding (CKGE) methods have been developed to efficiently update KG embeddings to accommodate new facts while maintaining learned knowledge. As KGs grow at different rates and scales in real-world scenarios, existing CKGE methods often fail to consider the varying scales of updates and lack systematic evaluation throughout the entire update process. In this paper, we propose SAGE, a scale-aware gradual evolution framework for CKGE. Specifically, SAGE firstly determine the embedding dimensions based on the update scales and expand the embedding space accordingly. The Dynamic Distillation mechanism is further employed to balance the preservation of learned knowledge and the incorporation of new facts. We conduct extensive experiments on seven benchmarks, and the results show that SAGE consistently outperforms existing baselines, with a notable improvement of 1.38% in MRR, 1.25% in H@1 and 1.6% in H@10. Furthermore, experiments comparing SAGE with methods using fixed embedding dimensions show that SAGE achieves optimal performance on every snapshot, demonstrating the importance of adaptive embedding dimensions in CKGE. The codes of SAGE are publicly available at: https://github.com/lyfxjtu/Dynamic-Embedding.

Muye Huang, Lingling Zhang, Jie Ma et al.

Charts are high-density visualization carriers for complex data, serving as a crucial medium for information extraction and analysis. Automated chart understanding poses significant challenges to existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the need for precise and complex visual reasoning. Current step-by-step reasoning models primarily focus on text-based logical reasoning for chart understanding. However, they struggle to refine or correct their reasoning when errors stem from flawed visual understanding, as they lack the ability to leverage multimodal interaction for deeper comprehension. Inspired by human cognitive behavior, we propose ChartSketcher, a multimodal feedback-driven step-by-step reasoning method designed to address these limitations. ChartSketcher is a chart understanding model that employs Sketch-CoT, enabling MLLMs to annotate intermediate reasoning steps directly onto charts using a programmatic sketching library, iteratively feeding these visual annotations back into the reasoning process. This mechanism enables the model to visually ground its reasoning and refine its understanding over multiple steps. We employ a two-stage training strategy: a cold start phase to learn sketch-based reasoning patterns, followed by off-policy reinforcement learning to enhance reflection and generalization. Experiments demonstrate that ChartSketcher achieves promising performance on chart understanding benchmarks and general vision tasks, providing an interactive and interpretable approach to chart comprehension.

Xinyu Zhang, Lingling Zhang, Yanrui Wu et al.

Visual Question Generation (VQG) research focuses predominantly on natural images while neglecting the diagram, which is a critical component in educational materials. To meet the needs of pedagogical assessment, we propose the Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation (DDCQG) task and construct DiagramQG, a comprehensive dataset with 15,720 diagrams and 25,798 questions across 37 subjects and 371 courses. Our approach employs course and input text constraints to generate course-relevant questions about specific diagram elements. We reveal three challenges of DDCQG: domain-specific knowledge requirements across courses, long-tail distribution in course coverage, and high information density in diagrams. To address these, we propose the Hierarchical Knowledge Integration framework (HKI-DDCQG), which utilizes trainable CLIP for identifying relevant diagram patches, leverages frozen vision-language models for knowledge extraction, and generates questions with trainable T5. Experiments demonstrate that HKI-DDCQG outperforms existing models on DiagramQG while maintaining strong generalizability across natural image datasets, establishing a strong baseline for DDCQG.