SciGraphQA: A Large-Scale Synthetic Multi-Turn Question-Answering Dataset for Scientific Graphs
In this work, we present SciGraphQA, a synthetic multi-turn question-answer
dataset related to academic graphs. SciGraphQA is 13 times larger than
ChartVQA, the previously largest chart-visual question-answering dataset. It is
also the largest open-sourced chart VQA dataset with non-synthetic charts. To
build our dataset, we selected 290,000 Computer Science or Machine Learning
ArXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020, and then used Palm-2 to generate
295K samples of open-vocabulary multi-turn question-answering dialogues about
the graphs. As context, we provided the text-only Palm-2 with paper title,
abstract, paragraph mentioning the graph, and rich text contextual data from
the graph itself, obtaining dialogues with an average 2.23 question-answer
turns for each graph. We asked GPT-4 to assess the matching quality of our
question-answer turns given the paper's context, obtaining an average rating of
8.7/10 on our 3K test set. We evaluated the 0-shot capability of the most
popular MLLM models such as LLaVa, mPLUGowl, BLIP-2, and openFlamingo's on our
dataset, finding LLaVA-13B being the most performant with a CIDEr score of
0.08. We further enriched the question prompts for LLAVA by including the
serialized data tables extracted from the graphs using the DePlot model,
boosting LLaVA's 0-shot CIDEr to 0.15. To verify the validity of our dataset,
we also fine-tuned LLaVa using our dataset, reaching a substantially higher
CIDEr score of 0.26. We anticipate further accuracy improvement by including
segmentation mask tokens and leveraging larger LLM backbones coupled with
emergent prompting techniques. Our code and data are open-sourced.