{"ID":2890708,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18022","arxiv_id":"2507.18022","title":"Does visualization help AI understand data?","abstract":"Charts and graphs help people analyze data, but can they also be useful to AI systems? To investigate this question, we perform a series of experiments with two commercial vision-language models: GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5. Across three representative analysis tasks, the two systems describe synthetic datasets more precisely and accurately when raw data is accompanied by a scatterplot, especially as datasets grow in complexity. Comparison with two baselines -- providing a blank chart and a chart with mismatched data -- shows that the improved performance is due to the content of the charts. Our results are initial evidence that AI systems, like humans, can benefit from visualization.","short_abstract":"Charts and graphs help people analyze data, but can they also be useful to AI systems? To investigate this question, we perform a series of experiments with two commercial vision-language models: GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5. Across three representative analysis tasks, the two systems describe synthetic datasets more precise...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18022","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18022v1","authors":"[\"Victoria R. Li\",\"Johnathan Sun\",\"Martin Wattenberg\"]","published":"2025-07-24T01:47:34Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\",\"cs.HC\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}