data visualization developers

Abstract: Real-world visualization requests are routinely ambiguous, incomplete, or factually incorrect, yet existing Text-to-Visualization (Text-to-Vis) systems assume well-specified inputs and produce charts in a single pass. When queries are imperfect, a system must \emph{interact} with the user to recover the true intent, but no benchmark or method supports this dynamic process. We introduce \textbf{VisInteract}, a new paradigm that reframes Text-to-Vis as interaction-driven intent recovery, and \textbf{VisInteract-Bench}, to our knowledge, that is the first benchmark for dynamic interactive Text-to-Vis, featuring controlled imperfection injection, a leakage-controlled User Agent for realistic multi-turn feedback, and dual-perspective (code and chart) automated evaluation. On the algorithmic side, we propose \textbf{Vis-MCTS}, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) enhanced method, introducing improvements over classical MCTS, that \emph{Progressive Widening} to tame the unbounded tool-argument space in tree search, \emph{cross-rollout information sharing} so clarifications and critiques benefit the entire search tree, and \emph{Dimension-Aware Reward Decomposition} that routes scalar user feedback along data-fidelity, visual-design, and intent-alignment dimensions to resolve credit assignment across heterogeneous actions. Extensive Experiments across two LLM backbones show that Vis-MCTS consistently outperforms all Text-to-Vis baselines, improving end-to-end task success by $13.40\%$--$16.27\%$ over the strongest interactive baseline and by more than $5\times$ over non-interactive ones.

Abstract: A chart may be declarative; authoring it is not. Visualization grammars often describe charts as finished specifications, whereas people construct them through a sequence of authoring actions. This mismatch can make visualization code difficult for humans to interpret and for machines to generate from human intent. ggaction addresses this gap by modeling the chart authoring process itself. In ggaction, individual authoring actions are abstracted as functions, and the authoring process is expressed as a chain of these functions. This representation more closely aligns chart designers' authoring intent with code specifications, making the code easily understandable to both humans and machines, including language models. Through a series of evaluations, we show that ggaction is sufficiently expressive to capture common chart authoring intents and outperforms widely used visualization grammars, including Vega-Lite and ggplot2, in both human and machine interpretability. ggaction is available at github.com/ggaction/ggaction.

Abstract: As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) support a growing range of input modalities, increasing work explores how to incorporate rough sketches to convey user intent. For annotated chart generation, it remains unclear what annotation sketches people provide and when such visual input helps MLLMs generate more useful annotations. In this study, we examine when sketch input is useful for MLLM-generated chart annotations across variation in chart type and caption type. In addition, we qualitatively analyze participants' explanations of their output preferences to characterize what made generated annotations more or less helpful. To further document participants' annotation sketches, we present AnnoSketch, comprising 1,600 annotation sketches collected across 160 chart-caption pairs from the conditions in which sketch guidance proved most beneficial, together with participants' annotation intents, perceived comprehension difficulty, and self-reported expressive limitations. We also label these sketches with structured metadata describing how each sketch relates to its caption and how participants express annotations through visual marks. Together, our study and AnnoSketch help determine when to solicit sketch input and provide empirical source for how people sketch chart annotations to support captions. The dataset and supplemental materials are available in our OSF repository.

Abstract: We report on a case study for designing authoring environments for interactive visualizations to enhance scientific work. We conducted a workshop and prototype review with a group of marine biologists. When it came to visualizing their data, participants identified challenges in conveying their research accurately and completely as well as and analyzing it with ease. Based on our findings, authoring environments should consider the context of scientific work aspects such as domain expertise, collaboration culture, and publication traditions. We propose consideration of non-traditional programming languages and environments for scientific work, discuss ways of facilitating interactive visualizations for scientists, and examine ways of meaningfully integrating AI. The critiques, artifacts, and reactions from the scientists along with our analysis and discussion inform how computational tools should be designed for scientific work.