| title | ChartWalker: Benchmarking the Cross-Chart RAG Task |
|---|---|
| authors | Ning Tang, Chenghan Xie, Hanyang Yuan, Yi Li, Renhong Huang, Qian Kou, Xiaofeng Shi, Hua Zhou, Jiarong Xu |
| date | 2026-06-22 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2606.23997 |
| affiliation | Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence |
| upvotes | 4 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf code |
| abstract | Cross-Chart Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is critical for complex multi-modal analytical tasks in scientific, business, and political domains. However, existing benchmarks either focus on tables, which are well-structured and textualized, or generate cross-chart questions by simply extracting key points, which often induces lexical overlap between queries and evidence and yields logically inconsistent reasoning chains. To address this, we introduce ChartWalker, a novel framework for constructing challenging cross-chart RAG tasks. ChartWalker features a hierarchical knowledge graph construction method tailored to charts, which organizes entities and relations by granularity to preserve analytical structure. We then propose a structure-aware sampling algorithm that synthesizes semantically coherent, multi-hop reasoning paths, enabling explicit control over query difficulty and granularity for QA generation. Built with this framework, we release ChartWalker-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse domains and cross-chart query types. Extensive evaluations across major RAG paradigms reveal significant performance gaps, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty and utility. Furthermore, we provide ChartWalker-Agent, an agentic baseline to facilitate analysis and inspire future system design. |
cite
@misc{tang2026chartwalker,
title={ChartWalker: Benchmarking the Cross-Chart RAG Task},
author={Ning Tang and Chenghan Xie and Hanyang Yuan and Yi Li and Renhong Huang and Qian Kou and Xiaofeng Shi and Hua Zhou and Jiarong Xu},
year={2026},
eprint={2606.23997},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23997}
}