ChartInstruct: Instruction Tuning for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning
This addresses the need for more versatile chart analysis tools for users in data-driven fields, though it is incremental as it builds on existing vision-language and instruction-tuning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of limited real-world applicability of task-specific models for chart comprehension by introducing ChartInstruct, a novel chart-specific vision-language instruction-following dataset with 191K instructions from 71K charts, and presents two instruction-tuning systems that achieve state-of-the-art results on four downstream tasks.
Charts provide visual representations of data and are widely used for analyzing information, addressing queries, and conveying insights to others. Various chart-related downstream tasks have emerged recently, such as question-answering and summarization. A common strategy to solve these tasks is to fine-tune various models originally trained on vision tasks language. However, such task-specific models are not capable of solving a wide range of chart-related tasks, constraining their real-world applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ChartInstruct: a novel chart-specific vision-language Instruction-following dataset comprising 191K instructions generated with 71K charts. We then present two distinct systems for instruction tuning on such datasets: (1) an end-to-end model that connects a vision encoder for chart understanding with a LLM; and (2) a pipeline model that employs a two-step approach to extract chart data tables and input them into the LLM. In experiments on four downstream tasks, we first show the effectiveness of our model--achieving a new set of state-of-the-art results. Further evaluation shows that our instruction-tuning approach supports a wide array of real-world chart comprehension and reasoning scenarios, thereby expanding the scope and applicability of our models to new kinds of tasks.