Data Visualization

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Overview

Data visualization turns data into charts, maps, diagrams, and interactive views so people can find patterns, compare values, and communicate evidence. Research develops visual encodings and analysis tools, including dimensionality-reduction methods, scientific visualization workflows, and accessible alternatives such as sonification. A growing line of work uses language and vision models to generate, edit, explain, and interpret charts, while benchmarks test these systems on chart questions, code generation, dashboards, and multi-step scientific tasks. A central challenge is making outputs faithful and useful: models can produce plausible visuals yet misread data, miss design or perceptual rules, and struggle with complex interactions, so evaluation must consider both machine metrics and human interpretation.

Latest papers

CardsList

121 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, up 80% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Aligned Multi-View Scripts for Universal Chart-to-Code Generation

    Apr 27, 2026Zhihan Zhang, Lizi LiaoCode GenerationParameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

    School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University

  2. Proteus: Shapeshifting Desktop Visualizations for Mobile via Multi-level Intelligent Adaptation

    Apr 25, 2026Can Liu, Sizhe Cheng, Feng Liang +4Data Visualization

    Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore · Providence Health & Services Renton, Washington, USA · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong, China

  3. GFlowState: Visualizing the Training of Generative Flow Networks Beyond the Reward

    Apr 23, 2026Florian Holeczek, Andreas Hinterreiter, Alex Hernandez-Garcia +2Data VisualizationGenerative Flow Networks

    Johannes Kepler University Linz · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

  4. XFlowMap: Cross-Scale Generalization and Mapping of Massive Origin-Destination Data

    Apr 23, 2026Diansheng Guo, Hai JinScientific VisualizationData Visualization

    Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  5. Beyond Single Plots: A Benchmark for Question Answering on Multi-Charts

    Apr 23, 2026Azher Ahmed Efat, Seok Hwan Song, Wallapak TavanapongData VisualizationMultimodal Large Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA

  6. Beyond Pixels: Introspective and Interactive Grounding for Visualization Agents

    Apr 22, 2026Yiyang Lu, Woong Shin, Ahmad Maroof Karimi +3Scientific VisualizationData Visualization

    William & Mary · Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  7. Beyond One Output: Visualizing and Comparing Distributions of Language Model Generations

    Apr 20, 2026Emily Reif, Claire Yang, Jared Hwang +3Open-Ended GenerationData Visualization

    University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA · Allen Institute for AI

  8. A Complementary Visualisation Suite for Empirical Performance Analysis: Tempographs, Histograms, Ridgeline Plots, Stacked Bar Charts, and Combination Charts Applied to Beethoven's Piano and Cello Sonatas

    Apr 18, 2026Ignasi SoleScientific VisualizationData Visualization

  9. Some Theoretical Limitations of t-SNE

    Apr 14, 2026Rupert Li, Elchanan MosselDimensionality ReductionData Visualization

  10. On the continuum limit of t-SNE for data visualization

    Apr 13, 2026Jeff Calder, Zhonggan Huang, Ryan Murray +1Data VisualizationDimensionality Reduction

    School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota · Department of Mathematics, University of Utah · Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University

  11. Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool

    Apr 10, 2026Sanchita S. Kamath, Aziz N Zeidieh, Venkatesh Potluri +3SonificationParticipatory Design

    School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, USA · Informatics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, USA · School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann-Harbour, Michigan, USA +1

  12. Accessible Fine-grained Data Representation via Spatial Audio

    Apr 10, 2026Can Liu, Wenjie Jiang, Shaolun Ruan +2SonificationData Visualization

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Singapore Management University, Singapore

  13. ChartDesign: Towards LLM Designer of Data Visualization

    Apr 6, 2026Mohammed Afaan Ansari, Aniruddh Bansal, Tianyi ZhouData Visualization

    University of Maryland, College Park College Park, MD, USA

  14. Beauty in the Eye of AI: Aligning LLMs and Vision Models with Human Aesthetics in Network Visualization

    Apr 3, 2026Peng Zhang, Xuefeng Li, Xiaoqi Wang +2Data VisualizationLLM-as-a-Judge

    Northeastern University, United States · Bosch AI Research, United States · The Ohio State University, United States

  15. True (VIS) Lies: Analyzing How Generative AI Recognizes Intentionality, Rhetoric, and Misleadingness in Visualization Lies

    Apr 1, 2026Graziano Blasilli, Marco AngeliniData VisualizationVLM Evaluation

    Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy. · Link Campus University, Rome, Italy.

  16. SciVisAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Agents

    Mar 31, 2026Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Kaiyuan Tang +13Scientific VisualizationData Visualization

    University of Notre Dame · Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory · University of Utah +4

  17. ChartNet: A Million-Scale, High-Quality Multimodal Dataset for Robust Chart Understanding

    Mar 28, 2026Jovana Kondic, Pengyuan Li, Dhiraj Joshi +24Chart UnderstandingData Visualization

    MIT · IBM Research · MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab +1

  18. Rhythmic segment analysis: Conceptualizing, visualizing, and measuring rhythmic data

    Mar 27, 2026Bas CornelissenData Visualization

    Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  19. From Pen to Pixel: Translating Hand-Drawn Plots into Graphical APIs via a Novel Benchmark and Efficient Adapter

    Mar 27, 2026Zhenghao Xu, Mengning YangData VisualizationChart Understanding

    School of Big Data and Software Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China · School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China.

  20. ChArtist: Generating Pictorial Charts with Unified Spatial and Subject Control

    Mar 15, 2026Shishi Xiao, Tongyu Zhou, David Laidlaw +1Controllable Image GenerationData Visualization

    Brown University · Adobe Research

  21. A Visualization for Comparative Analysis of Regression Models

    Mar 10, 2026Nassime Mountasir, Baptiste Lafabregue, Bruno Albert +1Visual AnalyticsData Visualization

    ICube · Laboratoire ICube, Université de Strasbourg, 300 Bd Sébastien Brant, 67400 Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France · ENGLAB, Technology & Strategy Engineering, 3 rue Denis Papin, 67300 Schiltigheim, France

  22. Animating Petascale Time-varying Data on Commodity Hardware with LLM-assisted Scripting

    Mar 7, 2026Ishrat Jahan Eliza, Xuan Huang, Aashish Panta +4Scientific VisualizationData Visualization

    University of Utah · Vanderbilt University · ViSOAR LLC

  23. A Directed Graph Model and Experimental Framework for Design and Study of Time-Dependent Text Visualisation

    Mar 2, 2026Songhai Fan, Simon Angus, Tim Dwyer +3Data VisualizationVisual Analytics

    Monash University

  24. Explainable Iterative Data Visualisation Refinement via an LLM Agent

    Mar 2, 2026Burak Susam, Tingting MuData VisualizationVisual Analytics

    Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PT, UK

  25. De-rendering, Reasoning, and Repairing Charts with Vision-Language Models

    Feb 23, 2026Valentin Bonas, Martin Sinnona, Viviana Siless +1Data VisualizationChart Understanding

    Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina · Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina · Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Buenos Aires, Argentina

  26. Do Large Language Models Understand Data Visualization Rules?

    Feb 23, 2026Martin Sinnona, Valentin Bonas, Emmanuel Iarussi +1Data VisualizationLLM Evaluation

    Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina · Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina · Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Buenos Aires, Argentina

  27. Evaluating Graphical Perception Capabilities of Vision Transformers

    Feb 20, 2026Poonam Poonam, Pere-Pau Vázquez, Timo RopinskiVision TransformerData Visualization

    Ulm University, Ulm, 89081, Germany · Viscom Group, Institute of Media Informatics, Ulm University · ViRVIG Group, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech

  28. ChartAttack: Testing the Vulnerability of LLMs to Malicious Prompting in Chart Generation

    Jan 19, 2026Jesus-German Ortiz-Barajas, Jonathan Tonglet, Vivek Gupta +1Data VisualizationAdversarial Attacks on VLMs

    INSAIT · KU Leuven · Arizona State University +2

  29. From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models

    Oct 20, 2025Jiahao Tang, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Lijian Wu +8Data VisualizationChart-to-Code Generation

    CSU-JPG, Central South University · National University of Singapore · Nanyang Technological University

  30. Conversational DNA: A Visual Language and Interactive Atlas of Human and AI Dialogue

    Aug 11, 2025Baihan LinData VisualizationHuman-AI Interaction

    Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138