---
license: cc-by-sa-4.0
task_categories:
- visual-question-answering
- question-answering
tags:
- charts
- vision-language
- chart-question-answering
- synthetic-data
pretty_name: Chartographer
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
language:
- en
source_datasets:
- lytang/ChartMuseum
- HuggingFaceM4/ChartQA
- princeton-nlp/CharXiv
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: chartmuseum_dev
    path: data/chartmuseum_dev.jsonl
  - split: chartqa_val
    path: data/chartqa_val.jsonl
  - split: charxiv_validation
    path: data/charxiv_validation.jsonl
---

# Chartographer

Chartographer is a chart reasoning dataset for evaluating whether
vision-language models answer chart questions through visual reasoning rather
than shortcuts or prior familiarity with a chart. Each chart-question family
contains an upstream original chart, a reconstructed chart, and ten
seed-controlled counterfactual variants with the same Chartographer `chart_id`
and `question_id`.

More details on the construction pipeline and evaluation protocol are available
in the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27311).

<img src="assets/pipeline_overview.png" alt="Chartographer pipeline overview" width="100%">

## Fields

Rows are stored in `data/*.jsonl`.

- `chart_id`: chart identifier, shared by the original chart, reconstruction, and seed variants of the same chart.
- `question_id`: question identifier, shared by all variants for the same question.
- `variant`: chart variant, one of `original`, `reconstruction`, or `seed_0` through `seed_9`.
- `image`: relative path to the released chart image; empty for `original` rows because upstream original images are not included.
- `question`: question asked about the chart image.
- `answer`: reference answer for the row's chart variant.
- `chart_data`: relative path to the released chart data JSON; empty for `original` rows.
- `source_dataset_split`: source dataset split identifier for this Chartographer row, combining the upstream dataset and split used in the release.
- `source_row_index`: zero-based row index in the upstream dataset split identified by `source_dataset_split`.

## Intended Use

Chartographer is intended for chart visual question answering evaluation,
especially comparisons between original charts, reconstructed charts, and
controlled counterfactual chart variants.

## License Notes

Chartographer is released under CC BY-SA 4.0 where permitted by the source
terms. Upstream original images are not included and may be governed by separate
licenses. To recover upstream original images and source records, use
`source_row_index` with the upstream Hugging Face dataset and split listed in
`metadata/dataset_info.json`.

Chartographer keeps its own evaluated `question` and `answer` fields, which may
differ from the exact QA text stored in the upstream Hugging Face row.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{jiang2026chartographer,
  title={Chartographer: Counterfactual Chart Generation for Evaluating Vision-Language Models},
  author={Yifan Jiang and Dae Yon Hwang and Jesse C. Cresswell and Freda Shi},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2605.27311},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27311}, 
}
```

## Loading

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("json", data_files={
    "chartmuseum_dev": "data/chartmuseum_dev.jsonl",
    "chartqa_val": "data/chartqa_val.jsonl",
    "charxiv_validation": "data/charxiv_validation.jsonl",
})
```