Title: Chart-R1: Chain-of-Thought Supervision and Reinforcement for Advanced Chart Reasoner
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Chart Understanding and Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Recently, inspired by OpenAI-o1/o3 and Deepseek-R1, the R1-style method based on reinforcement fine-tuning has received widespread attention from the community. Previous R1-style methods mainly focus on mathematical reasoning and code intelligence. It is of great research significance to verify their advantages on more general multimodal data. Chart is an important multimodal data type with rich information, which brings important research challenges in complex reasoning. In this work, we introduce Chart-R1, a chart-domain vision-language model with reinforcement fine-tuning to enable complex chart reasoning. To support Chart-R1, we first propose a novel programmatic data synthesis technology to generate high-quality step-by-step chart reasoning data covering single- and multi-subcharts, which makes up for the lack of reasoning data in the chart domain. Then we develop a two-stage training strategy: Chart-COT with step-by-step chain-of-thought supervision, and Chart-RFT with numerically sensitive reinforcement fine-tuning. Chart-COT aims to decompose complex chart reasoning tasks into fine-grained, understandable subtasks through step-by-step supervision, which lays a good foundation for improving the reasoning capacity of reinforcement learning. Chart-RFT utilizes the typical group relative policy optimization strategy, in which a relatively soft reward is adopted for numerical response to emphasize the numerical sensitivity in the chart domain. We conduct extensive experiments on open-source benchmarks and a self-built chart reasoning dataset (\emph{i.e., ChartRQA}). Experimental results show that Chart-R1 has significant advantages compared to chart-domain methods, even comparable to open/closed source large-scale models (\emph{e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3.5}).