ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch

TL;DR

ChartVerse introduces a scalable framework for synthesizing complex, high-quality chart reasoning data from scratch, enabling improved vision-language models for complex chart understanding.

Contribution

The paper presents novel metrics, a complexity-aware chart synthesis method, and a truth-anchored inverse QA approach to generate rigorous reasoning data.

Findings

ChartVerse-8B surpasses its teacher and rivals larger models in chart reasoning tasks.

The framework effectively synthesizes diverse, high-complexity charts with rigorous reasoning.

State-of-the-art performance achieved on chart reasoning benchmarks.

Abstract

Chart reasoning is a critical capability for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the development of open-source models is severely hindered by the lack of high-quality training data. Existing datasets suffer from a dual challenge: synthetic charts are often simplistic and repetitive, while the associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations and lack the reasoning depth required for complex tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ChartVerse, a scalable framework designed to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. (1) To address the bottleneck of simple patterns, we first introduce Rollout Posterior Entropy (RPE), a novel metric that quantifies chart complexity. Guided by RPE, we develop complexity-aware chart coder to autonomously synthesize diverse, high-complexity charts via executable programs. (2) To guarantee reasoning rigor, we develop truth-anchored inverse QA synthesis. Diverging from standard generation, we adopt an answer-first paradigm: we extract deterministic answers directly from the source code, generate questions conditional on these anchors, and enforce strict consistency verification. To further elevate difficulty and reasoning depth, we filter samples based on model fail-rate and distill high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We curate ChartVerse-SFT-600K and ChartVerse-RL-40K using Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking as the teacher. Experimental results demonstrate that ChartVerse-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably surpassing its teacher and rivaling the stronger Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking. We release our code, model weights, and datasets in https://chartverse.github.io.