A Governed Agent Architecture for Natural-Language Dashboard Generation over Enterprise DataBrain

Analytic dashboards combine coordinated views and interactions for data exploration and decision-making. Recent models can generate them from data and natural-language goals, but evaluating their usefulness remains difficult. Dashboard generation is open-ended, and neither static appearance nor successful execution alone captures analytical support and interaction quality. We introduce DashArena, to our knowledge the first benchmark for open-ended, task-grounded generation of interactive analytic dashboards. Its key innovation is to require each system to generate both a dashboard and a replayable interaction trajectory. A browser executor replays the trajectory and turns the system's intended analytical workflow into reproducible visual and execution evidence. A VLM judge compares candidates using this evidence, and Bradley--Terry aggregation produces the leaderboard. We further distill the judge into the open-weight DashJudge-8B. Human evaluations show that DashJudge-8B effectively reproduces human judgments and ablations show that interaction evidence improves judge agreement. Experiments with frontier models reveal persistent rendering, analytical, and interaction failures. Together, these results show that realistic dashboard generation remains challenging and that interaction-aware evaluation captures failures missed by static or execution-only checks.

Non-technical stakeholders frequently cannot write the SQL needed to extract insights from operational databases. We built and evaluated a Text-to-SQL agent that closes this gap end to end: a six-node LangGraph StateGraph checks question relevance, fetches the live schema, generates PostgreSQL, validates it with a dry run, retries on failure, executes the query, and narrates the result set in plain English. The agent uses prompt engineering only; no model was fine-tuned. We evaluated it on the Chicago Crime dataset (approximately 8.5 million records, 22 attributes) against a hand-built benchmark of 100 natural language questions with ground-truth SQL, stratified into 30 Easy, 40 Medium and 30 Hard items. Comparing two prompt revisions of the same agent, the revised system (V2) reached a Valid SQL Rate of 93% (from 87%), an Execution Accuracy of 60% under a hybrid relational equivalence metric (from 47%; 19% from 12% under strict JSON matching), and a mean Synthesis Quality of 4.34 out of 5 (from 3.91). The single largest driver was removing a LIMIT 10 instruction from the system prompt, which had been truncating multi-row answers. Error analysis attributes the residual failures to relevance-checker false rejections, ambiguous question semantics, and free-tier API rate limits rather than to the language generation step. We report no comparison against an external baseline system or a public benchmark; the study is a single-model engineering evaluation.

Automatic data visualization generation has advanced rapidly with multi-modal large language models, yet existing efforts largely focus on static charts and overlook the interactive dashboards commonly used for real-world data exploration. We introduce Dashboard2Code, a novel task that requires a model to proactively explore an interactive dashboard, acquire and integrate feedback from its own interactions (e.g., clicking and filtering), and generate code that reproduces the target dashboard. To support comprehensive evaluation, we present DashboardMimic, the first Plotly+Dash benchmark for Dashboard2Code, comprising 180 carefully designed and manually verified dashboard-code pairs spanning three difficulty levels and covering eight common real-world interaction patterns. We further propose an automated evaluation framework tailored to dashboards that combines code semantic analysis with dynamic interaction-based testing to assess visual and interaction consistency, showing strong agreement with human judgments. Experiments across a range of open- and closed-source multi-modal models reveal that even the strongest systems struggle on high-complexity dashboards and that a substantial performance gap remains between open-source and closed-source models on the Dashboard2Code task.