Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs

Abstract

Solving complex chart Q&A tasks requires advanced visual reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including recognizing key information from visual inputs and conducting reasoning over it. While fine-tuning MLLMs for reasoning is critical, collecting and annotating charts and questions is expensive, hard to scale, and often results in low-quality annotations. To address this, we propose Code-as-Intermediary Translation (CIT), a cost-effective, efficient and scalable data synthesis method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. The code serves as an intermediary that translates visual chart representations into textual representations, enabling language models to understand cross-modal information and generate reasoning chains accordingly. In this way, we can employ text-based synthesizing techniques to expand chart-plotting code and generate high-quality Q&A pairs for training models. This produces ReachQA, a dataset containing 3k reasoning-intensive charts and 20k Q&A pairs to enhance both recognition and reasoning abilities of MLLMs. Experiments show that models fine-tuned with ReachQA not only perform well on chart-related tasks but also show performance gains on general reasoning benchmarks. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/hewei2001/ReachQA.