ChartM^3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing
  Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension
Authors: name: Duo Xu, name: Hao Cheng, name: Xin Lin, name: Zhen Xie, name: Hao Wang

Complex chart understanding tasks demand advanced visual recognition and
reasoning capabilities from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However,
current research provides limited coverage of complex chart scenarios and
computation-intensive reasoning tasks prevalent in real-world applications.
This study proposes an automated multi-stage code-driven pipeline for
systematically generating visual reasoning datasets to address these
limitations. The pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to
retrieve professional chart templates and employs chain-of-thought (CoT)
strategies to generate reasoning codes that simulate real data distributions,
thereby driving chart rendering and question-related statistical computations.
Through model-based evaluation, the pipeline enhances chart diversity and data
quality. Using this framework, we construct ChartM^3, a multi-dimensional and
multi-step dataset containing 38K charts and 142K Q&A pairs for training, along
with 2,871 high-quality evaluation samples for enabling practical performance
assessment. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL)
experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves reasoning
capabilities and cross-domain generalization performance, enabling smaller
models to achieve performance comparable to larger-scale models in complex
chart comprehension.