ChartMark: A Structured Grammar for Chart Annotation

Chart annotations enhance visualization accessibility but suffer from fragmented, non-standardized representations that limit cross-platform reuse. We propose ChartMark, a structured grammar that separates annotation semantics from visualization implementations. ChartMark features a hierarchical framework mapping onto annotation dimensions (e.g., task, chart context), supporting both abstract intents and precise visual details. Our toolkit demonstrates converting ChartMark specifications into Vega-Lite visualizations, highlighting its flexibility, expressiveness, and practical applicability.

ChartCards: A Chart-Metadata Generation Framework for Multi-Task Chart Understanding

The emergence of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) presents new opportunities for chart understanding. However, due to the fine-grained nature of these tasks, applying MLLMs typically requires large, high-quality datasets for task-specific fine-tuning, leading to high data collection and training costs. To address this, we propose ChartCards, a unified chart-metadata generation framework for multi-task chart understanding. ChartCards systematically synthesizes various chart information, including data tables, visualization code, visual elements, and multi-dimensional semantic captions. By structuring this information into organized metadata, ChartCards enables a single chart to support multiple downstream tasks, such as text-to-chart retrieval, chart summarization, chart-to-table conversion, chart description, and chart question answering. Using ChartCards, we further construct MetaChart, a large-scale high-quality dataset containing 10,862 data tables, 85K charts, and 170 K high-quality chart captions. We validate the dataset through qualitative crowdsourcing evaluations and quantitative fine-tuning experiments across various chart understanding tasks. Fine-tuning six different models on MetaChart resulted in an average performance improvement of 5% across all tasks. The most notable improvements are seen in text-to-chart retrieval and chart-to-table tasks, with Long-CLIP and Llama 3.2-11B achieving improvements of 17% and 28%, respectively.

nvBench 2.0: A Benchmark for Natural Language to Visualization under Ambiguity

Natural Language to Visualization (NL2VIS) enables users to create visualizations from natural language queries, making data insights more accessible. However, NL2VIS faces challenges in interpreting ambiguous queries, as users often express their visualization needs in imprecise language. To address this challenge, we introduce nvBench 2.0, a new benchmark designed to evaluate NL2VIS systems in scenarios involving ambiguous queries. nvBench 2.0 includes 7,878 natural language queries and 24,076 corresponding visualizations, derived from 780 tables across 153 domains. It is built using a controlled ambiguity-injection pipeline that generates ambiguous queries through a reverse-generation workflow. By starting with unambiguous seed visualizations and selectively injecting ambiguities, the pipeline yields multiple valid interpretations for each query, with each ambiguous query traceable to its corresponding visualization through step-wise reasoning paths. We evaluate various Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to perform ambiguous NL2VIS tasks using nvBench 2.0. We also propose Step-NL2VIS, an LLM-based model trained on nvBench 2.0, which enhances performance in ambiguous scenarios through step-wise preference optimization. Our results show that Step-NL2VIS outperforms all baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art for ambiguous NL2VIS tasks.