arXiv subjects

Saleem Ahmed

Publications and source records attributed to Saleem Ahmed.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RealCQA-V2: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Structured Visual Entailment over Scientific Charts

Multimodal reasoning models often produce fluent answers supported by seemingly coherent rationales. Existing benchmarks evaluate only final-answer correctness. They do not support atomic visual entailment verification of intermediate steps, especially visual compositional logic. This limitation is especially acute in scientific chart understanding, where answers depend on deterministically grounded visual semantics such as axes, legends, and quantitative relations. We introduce RealCQA-V2, a large-scale benchmark that reformulates chart question answering as Visual Premise Proving (VPP): a structured logical entailment task over chart-grounded visual predicates. Each question is deconstructed into manually curated, atomic premises grounded in chart elements (axes, legends, marks, and quantitative relations), yielding executable reasoning chains rather than free-form textual rationales. These premises form compositional reasoning chains, enabling verification at the level of individual visual statements and complete reasoning sequences. We introduce chain-level metrics that measure both full logical validity (AccVPP) and partial reasoning progress within failed chains (DCP), extending beyond traditional VQA accuracy. Baseline evaluations across representative LVLMs reveal a consistent local-global reasoning gap: models often verify many individual premises correctly while failing to preserve coherence across the full chain. RealCQA-V2 establishes a reproducible benchmark for structured visual entailment over real scientific charts and enables rigorous diagnosis of multimodal reasoning beyond answer-only evaluation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Context-Aware Chart Element Detection

As a prerequisite of chart data extraction, the accurate detection of chart basic elements is essential and mandatory. In contrast to object detection in the general image domain, chart element detection relies heavily on context information as charts are highly structured data visualization formats. To address this, we propose a novel method CACHED, which stands for Context-Aware Chart Element Detection, by integrating a local-global context fusion module consisting of visual context enhancement and positional context encoding with the Cascade R-CNN framework. To improve the generalization of our method for broader applicability, we refine the existing chart element categorization and standardized 18 classes for chart basic elements, excluding plot elements. Our CACHED method, with the updated category of chart elements, achieves state-of-the-art performance in our experiments, underscoring the importance of context in chart element detection. Extending our method to the bar plot detection task, we obtain the best result on the PMC test dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

SpaDen : Sparse and Dense Keypoint Estimation for Real-World Chart Understanding

We introduce a novel bottom-up approach for the extraction of chart data. Our model utilizes images of charts as inputs and learns to detect keypoints (KP), which are used to reconstruct the components within the plot area. Our novelty lies in detecting a fusion of continuous and discrete KP as predicted heatmaps. A combination of sparse and dense per-pixel objectives coupled with a uni-modal self-attention-based feature-fusion layer is applied to learn KP embeddings. Further leveraging deep metric learning for unsupervised clustering, allows us to segment the chart plot area into various objects. By further matching the chart components to the legend, we are able to obtain the data series names. A post-processing threshold is applied to the KP embeddings to refine the object reconstructions and improve accuracy. Our extensive experiments include an evaluation of different modules for KP estimation and the combination of deep layer aggregation and corner pooling approaches. The results of our experiments provide extensive evaluation for the task of real-world chart data extraction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

RealCQA: Scientific Chart Question Answering as a Test-bed for First-Order Logic

We present a comprehensive study of chart visual question-answering(QA) task, to address the challenges faced in comprehending and extracting data from chart visualizations within documents. Despite efforts to tackle this problem using synthetic charts, solutions are limited by the shortage of annotated real-world data. To fill this gap, we introduce a benchmark and dataset for chart visual QA on real-world charts, offering a systematic analysis of the task and a novel taxonomy for template-based chart question creation. Our contribution includes the introduction of a new answer type, 'list', with both ranked and unranked variations. Our study is conducted on a real-world chart dataset from scientific literature, showcasing higher visual complexity compared to other works. Our focus is on template-based QA and how it can serve as a standard for evaluating the first-order logic capabilities of models. The results of our experiments, conducted on a real-world out-of-distribution dataset, provide a robust evaluation of large-scale pre-trained models and advance the field of chart visual QA and formal logic verification for neural networks in general.

cs.CV↗