CHARTQAPRO: A More Diverse and Challenging Benchmark for Chart Question Answering

Charts are ubiquitous, as people often use them to analyze data, answer questions, and discover critical insights. However, performing complex analytical tasks with charts requires significant perceptual and cognitive effort. Chart Question Answering (CQA) systems automate this process by enabling models to interpret and reason with visual representations of data. However, existing benchmarks like ChartQA lack real-world diversity and have recently shown performance saturation with modern large vision-language models (LVLMs). To address these limitations, we introduce CHARTQAPRO, a new benchmark that includes 1,341 charts from 99 diverse sources, spanning various chart types-including info-graphics and dashboards-and featuring 1,948 questions in various types, such as multiple-choice, conversational, hypothetical, and unanswerable questions, to better reflect real-world challenges. Our evaluations with 21 models show a substantial performance drop for LVLMs on CHARTQAPRO; e.g., Claude Sonnet 3.5 scores 90.5% on ChartQA but only 55.81% on CHARTQAPRO, underscoring the complexity of chart reasoning. We complement our findings with detailed error analyses and ablation studies, identifying key challenges and opportunities for advancing LVLMs in chart understanding and reasoning. We release CHARTQAPRO at https://github.com/visnlp/ChartQAPro.