Chartographer: Counterfactual Chart Generation for Evaluating Vision-Language Models

Chart question-answering (QA) benchmarks aim to pose questions that require visual reasoning to correctly answer, but vision-language models (VLMs) can often reach solutions through shortcuts or prior familiarity with a chart or question. To strictly evaluate visual reasoning, we propose counterfactual charts where the chart-question task remains fixed, but the underlying data and the corresponding answer are varied. We introduce Chartographer, a framework to reverse engineer charts into executable code, validate reconstruction fidelity, generate counterfactual variants, and derive new answers from executable QA logic. We apply this framework to existing chart QA datasets and evaluate pro...

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