{"ID":2842341,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11525","arxiv_id":"2601.11525","title":"PlotGen-Bench: Evaluating VLMs on Generating Visualization Code from Diverse Plots across Multiple Libraries","abstract":"Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded their multimodal code generation capabilities, yet their ability to generate executable visualization code from plots, especially for complex 3D, animated, plot-to-plot transformations, or multi-library scenarios, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce PlotGen-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating plot-to-code generation under realistic and complex visualization scenarios. The benchmark spans 9 major categories, 30 subcategories, and 3 core tasks-plot replication, plot transformation, and multi-library generation, covering both 2D, 3D and animated plots across 5 widely used visualization libraries. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs, we find that open-source models still lag considerably behind in visual fidelity and semantic consistency, despite achieving comparable code executability. Moreover, all models exhibit substantial degradation on reasoning-intensive tasks such as chart type conversion and animation generation. PlotGen-Bench establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing research toward more capable and reliable VLMs for visualization authoring and code synthesis, with all data and code available at https://plotgen.github.io.","short_abstract":"Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded their multimodal code generation capabilities, yet their ability to generate executable visualization code from plots, especially for complex 3D, animated, plot-to-plot transformations, or multi-library scenarios, remains underexplored. To address this gap,...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11525","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11525v1","authors":"[\"Yi Zhao\",\"Zhen Yang\",\"Shuaiqi Duan\",\"Wenmeng Yu\",\"Zhe Su\",\"Jibing Gong\",\"Jie Tang\"]","published":"2025-11-13T15:53:42Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}