Aligning Text, Code, and Vision: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Text-to-Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces RL-Text2Vis, a reinforcement learning framework that improves text-to-visualization generation by jointly optimizing accuracy, code validity, and visualization quality, significantly outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It presents the first reinforcement learning approach for Text2Vis, using a multi-objective reward and GRPO to enhance visualization quality and code execution success.

Findings

22% relative improvement in chart quality over GPT-4o

Code execution success increased from 78% to 97%

Robust generalization to out-of-domain datasets

Abstract

Text-to-Visualization (Text2Vis) systems translate natural language queries over tabular data into concise answers and executable visualizations. While closed-source LLMs generate functional code, the resulting charts often lack semantic alignment and clarity, qualities that can only be assessed post-execution. Open-source models struggle even more, frequently producing non-executable or visually poor outputs. Although supervised fine-tuning can improve code executability, it fails to enhance overall visualization quality, as traditional SFT loss cannot capture post-execution feedback. To address this gap, we propose RL-Text2Vis, the first reinforcement learning framework for Text2Vis generation. Built on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), our method uses a novel multi-objective reward that jointly optimizes textual accuracy, code validity, and visualization quality using post-execution feedback. By training Qwen2.5 models (7B and 14B), RL-Text2Vis achieves a 22% relative improvement in chart quality over GPT-4o on the Text2Vis benchmark and boosts code execution success from 78% to 97% relative to its zero-shot baseline. Our models significantly outperform strong zero-shot and supervised baselines and also demonstrate robust generalization to out-of-domain datasets like VIS-Eval and NVBench. These results establish GRPO as an effective strategy for structured, multimodal reasoning in visualization generation. We release our code at https://github.com/vis-nlp/RL-Text2Vis.