Donglu Yang

Donglu Yang, Liang Zhang, Zihao Yue et al.

Charts are a fundamental visualization format widely used in data analysis across research and industry. While enabling users to edit charts based on high-level intentions is of great practical value, existing methods primarily rely on natural language instructions, which are often too ambiguous to support fine-grained editing. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for multimodal chart editing, where user intent is expressed through a combination of natural language and visual indicators that explicitly highlight the elements to be modified. To support this paradigm, we present Chart$\text{M}^3$, a new benchmark for Multimodal chart editing with Multi-level complexity and Multi-perspective evaluation. Chart$\text{M}^3$ contains 1,000 samples spanning four levels of editing difficulty. Each sample includes triplets in the form of (chart, code, multimodal instructions). To comprehensively evaluate chart editing models, Chart$\text{M}^3$ provides metrics that assess both visual appearance and code correctness. Our benchmark reveals significant limitations in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including GPT-4o, particularly in their ability to interpret and act on visual indicators. To address this, we construct Chart$\text{M}^3$-Train, a large-scale training set with 24,000 multimodal chart editing samples. Fine-tuning MLLMs on this dataset leads to substantial improvements, demonstrating the importance of multimodal supervision in building practical chart editing systems. Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/MLrollIT/ChartM3. %https://github.com/MLrollIT/ChartM3Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/yaolinli/VCE.

Liangyu Chen, Yichen Xu, Jianzhe Ma et al.

Chart editing reduces manual effort in visualization design. Typical benchmarks limited in data diversity and assume access to complete chart code, which is seldom in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we present ChartEditVista, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7,964 samples spanning 31 chart categories. It encompasses diverse editing instructions and covers nearly all editable chart elements. The inputs in ChartEditVista include only the original chart image and natural language editing instructions, without the original chart codes. ChartEditVista is generated through a fully automated pipeline that produces, edits, and verifies charts, ensuring high-quality chart editing data. Besides, we introduce two novel fine-grained, rule-based evaluation metrics: the layout metric, which evaluates the position, size and color of graphical components; and the text metric, which jointly assesses textual content and font styling. Building on top of ChartEditVista, we present ChartEditor, a model trained using a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a novel rendering reward to simultaneously enforce code executability and visual fidelity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we demonstrate that ChartEditVista provides a robust evaluation, while ChartEditor consistently outperforms models with similar-scale and larger-scale on chart editing tasks.