InfoChartQA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Question Answering on Infographic Charts
This work addresses a gap in benchmarking MLLMs for infographic chart understanding, which is incremental as it provides a new dataset and evaluation framework for a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on understanding infographic charts with design-driven visual elements, by introducing InfoChartQA, a benchmark with 5,642 chart pairs and visual-element-based questions, which revealed a substantial performance decline in MLLs, especially for metaphor-related questions.
Understanding infographic charts with design-driven visual elements (e.g., pictograms, icons) requires both visual recognition and reasoning, posing challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing visual-question answering benchmarks fall short in evaluating these capabilities of MLLMs due to the lack of paired plain charts and visual-element-based questions. To bridge this gap, we introduce InfoChartQA, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on infographic chart understanding. It includes 5,642 pairs of infographic and plain charts, each sharing the same underlying data but differing in visual presentations. We further design visual-element-based questions to capture their unique visual designs and communicative intent. Evaluation of 20 MLLMs reveals a substantial performance decline on infographic charts, particularly for visual-element-based questions related to metaphors. The paired infographic and plain charts enable fine-grained error analysis and ablation studies, which highlight new opportunities for advancing MLLMs in infographic chart understanding. We release InfoChartQA at https://github.com/CoolDawnAnt/InfoChartQA.