@inproceedings{schleid-etal-2025-visual,
    title = "Visual Question Answering on Scientific Charts Using Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Models",
    author = "Schleid, Florian  and
      Strich, Jan  and
      Biemann, Chris",
    editor = "Ghosal, Tirthankar  and
      Mayr, Philipp  and
      Singh, Amanpreet  and
      Naik, Aakanksha  and
      Rehm, Georg  and
      Freitag, Dayne  and
      Li, Dan  and
      Schimmler, Sonja  and
      De Waard, Anita",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.sdp-1.19/",
    pages = "211--220",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-265-7",
    abstract = "Scientific charts often encapsulate the core findings of research papers, making the ability to answer questions about these charts highly valuable. This paper explores recent advancements in scientific chart visual question answering (VQA) enabled by large Vision Language Models (VLMs) and newly curated datasets. As part of the SciVQA shared task from the 5th Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, we develop and evaluate multimodal Systems capable of answering diverse question types - including multiple-choice, yes/no, unanswerable, and infinite answer set questions - based on chart images extracted from scientific literature. We investigate the effects of zero-shot and one-shot prompting, as well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), on the performance of Qwen2.5-VL models (7B and 32B variants). We also tried to include more training data from domain-specific datasets (SpiQA and ArXivQA). Our fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL 32B model achieves a substantial improvement over the GPT-4o-mini baseline and reaches the 4th place in the shared task, highlighting the effectiveness of domain-specific fine-tuning. We published the code for the experiments."
}