CharTool: Tool-Integrated Visual Reasoning for Chart Understanding

arXiv:2604.02794v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Charts are ubiquitous in scientific and financial literature for presenting structured data. However, chart reasoning remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the lack of high-quality training data, as well as the need for fine-grained visual grounding and precise numerical computation. To address these challenges, we first propose DuoChart, a scalable dual-source data pipeline that combines synthesized charts with real-world charts to construct diverse, high-quality chart training data. We then introduce CharTool, which equips MLLMs with external tools, including image cropping for localized visual perception and code-based computation for accurate numerical reasoning. Through agentic reinforcement learning on DuoChart, CharTool learns tool-integrated reasoning grounded in chart content. Extensive experiments on six chart benchmarks show that our method consistently improves over strong MLLM baselines across model scales. Notably, CharTool-7B outperforms the base model by **+8.0%** on CharXiv (Reasoning) and **+9.78%** on ChartQAPro, while achieving competitive performance with substantially larger or proprietary models. Moreover, CharTool demonstrates positive generalization to out-of-domain visual math reasoning benchmarks.