SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering
Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation deci...
| Authors | Ayush Dwivedi, Qixin Wang, Ashvi Soni et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 17 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 June 2026 |
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