Chart editing reduces manual effort in visualization design. Typical benchmarks assume access to complete chart code, which is unrealistic for real-world applications. In this paper, we present ChartEditVista, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7,964 samples spanning 31 chart categories. It encompasses diverse editing instruction types and covers nearly all editable chart elements. The inputs in ChartEditVista include only the original chart image and natural language editing instructions, without the original chart codes. ChartEditVista is generated through a fully automated pipeline that produces, edits, and verifies charts, ensuring high-quality data. Besides, we introduce two novel fine-grained, rule-based evaluation metrics: the layout metric, which evaluates the position, size; and color of graphical components, and the text metric, which jointly assesses textual content and font styling. Building on top of ChartEditVista, we present ChartEditor, a model trained using a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a novel rendering reward to simultaneously enforce code executability and visual fidelity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we demonstrate that ChartEditVista provides a robust evaluation, while ChartEditor consistently outperforms models with similar-scale and larger-scale on chart editing tasks.

Quyu Kong, Xu Zhang, Zhenyu Yang, Nolan Gao, Chen Liu, Panrong Tong, Chenglin Cai, Hanzhang Zhou, Jianan Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Zhidan Liu, Steven Hoi, Yue Wang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yichen Xu, Liangyu Chen, Liang Zhang, Zihao Yue, Jianzhe Ma, Wenxuan Wang, Qin Jin. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Charts are a fundamental visualization format widely used in data analysis across research and industry. While enabling users to edit charts based on high-level intentions is of great practical value, existing methods primarily rely on natural language instructions, which are often too ambiguous to support fine-grained editing. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for multimodal chart editing, where user intent is expressed through a combination of natural language and visual indicators that explicitly highlight the elements to be modified. To support this paradigm, we present ChartM3, a new benchmark for Multimodal chart editing with Multi-level complexity and Multi-perspective evaluation. ChartM3 contains 1,000 samples spanning four levels of editing difficulty. Each sample includes triplets in the form of (chart, code, multimodal instructions). To comprehensively evaluate chart editing models, ChartM3 provides metrics that assess both visual appearance and code correctness. Our benchmark reveals significant limitations in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including GPT-4o, particularly in their ability to interpret and act on visual indicators. To address this, we construct ChartM3-Train, a large-scale training set with 24,000 multimodal chart editing samples. Fine-tuning MLLMs on this dataset leads to substantial improvements, demonstrating the importance of multimodal supervision in building practical chart editing systems. Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/MLrollIT/ChartM3.