Zifeng Zhu


2025

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MultiChartQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Multi-Chart Problems
Zifeng Zhu | Mengzhao Jia | Zhihan Zhang | Lang Li | Meng Jiang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities across various tasks, including visual question answering and chart comprehension, yet existing benchmarks for chart-related tasks fall short in capturing the complexity of real-world multi-chart scenarios. Current benchmarks primarily focus on single-chart tasks, neglecting the multi-hop reasoning required to extract and integrate information from multiple charts, which is essential in practical applications. To fill this gap, we introduce MultiChartQA, a benchmark that evaluates MLLMs’ capabilities in four key areas: direct question answering, parallel question answering, comparative reasoning, and sequential reasoning. Our evaluation of a wide range of MLLMs reveals significant performance gaps compared to humans. These results highlight the challenges in multi-chart comprehension and the potential of MultiChartQA to drive advancements in this field. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Zivenzhu/Multi-chart-QA.