Papers › Answering Questions about Data Visualizations using Efficient Bimodal Fusion
Answering Questions about Data Visualizations using Efficient Bimodal Fusion
Kushal Kafle, Robik Shrestha, Brian Price, Scott Cohen, Christopher Kanan
Chart question answering (CQA) is a newly proposed visual question answering (VQA) task where an algorithm must answer questions about data visualizations, e.g. bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs. CQA requires capabilities that natural-image VQA algorithms lack: fine-grained measurements, optical character recognition, and handling out-of-vocabulary words in both questions and answers. Without modifications, state-of-the-art VQA algorithms perform poorly on this task. Here, we propose a novel CQA algorithm called parallel recurrent fusion of image and language (PReFIL). PReFIL first learns bimodal embeddings by fusing question and image features and then intelligently aggregates these learned embeddings to answer the given question. Despite its simplicity, PReFIL greatly surpasses state-of-the art systems and human baselines on both the FigureQA and DVQA datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that PReFIL can be used to reconstruct tables by asking a series of questions about a chart.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | DVQA test-familiar | PReFIL (Oracle OCR) | 1:1 Accuracy | 96.37 | #1 of 1 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | FigureQA - test 1 | PReFIL | 1:1 Accuracy | 94.88 | #1 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | PlotQA-D1 | PReFIL | 1:1 Accuracy | 57.91 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | PlotQA-D2 | PReFIL | 1:1 Accuracy | 10.37 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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