VisCoder: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Executable Python Visualization Code
  Generation
Authors: name: Yuansheng Ni; name: Ping Nie; name: Kai Zou; name: Xiang Yue; name: Wenhu Chen
Published: 2025-06-04 13:24:44

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with visualization tasks like
plotting diagrams, charts, where success depends on both code correctness and
visual semantics. Existing instruction-tuning datasets lack execution-grounded
supervision and offer limited support for iterative code correction, resulting
in fragile and unreliable plot generation. We present VisCode-200K, a
large-scale instruction tuning dataset for Python-based visualization and
self-correction. It contains over 200K examples from two sources: (1) validated
plotting code from open-source repositories, paired with natural language
instructions and rendered plots; and (2) 45K multi-turn correction dialogues
from Code-Feedback, enabling models to revise faulty code using runtime
feedback. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct on VisCode-200K to create
VisCoder, and evaluate it on PandasPlotBench. VisCoder significantly
outperforms strong open-source baselines and approaches the performance of
proprietary models like GPT-4o-mini. We further adopt a self-debug evaluation
protocol to assess iterative repair, demonstrating the benefits of
feedback-driven learning for executable, visually accurate code generation.