Paper Detail

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Fen Wang, Zekai Shao, Qiman Kang, Chunran Hu, Zhixuan Zhang, Lexu Xie, Chao Liu, Siming Chen

arxiv Score 19.6

Published 2026-05-22 · First seen 2026-05-25

General AI

Abstract

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics -- Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity -- to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

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BibTeX

@article{wang2026chartfi,
  title = {ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models},
  author = {Fen Wang and Zekai Shao and Qiman Kang and Chunran Hu and Zhixuan Zhang and Lexu Xie and Chao Liu and Siming Chen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerati},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23694},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2605.23694},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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