Demonstrating chart-plot: Closing the Last Mile of Academic Chart Generation

2026-06-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the “last-mile” gap between executable code and publication-ready academic figures by proposing chart-plot, an intelligent agent framework for end-to-end generation and precise editing of conference-quality visualizations. The approach innovatively distills target conference figure style guidelines into textual skill instructions to guide large language models in style-conditioned code generation. It further establishes a rendering feedback loop within a LaTeX environment to iteratively refine layout and introduces a structured figure representation enabling direct, element-level manipulation. Experimental evaluations across three representative academic chart types and user studies demonstrate that the framework substantially reduces manual revision cycles while significantly improving both the quality and efficiency of figure production.

Abstract

Large language models can translate a researcher's intent into runnable matplotlib code, yet the resulting chart rarely lands in a paper without multiple rounds of manual revision. We argue that the open problem is not chart code generation but chart publication: making the output look like a top-venue figure, survive the target layout, and respond to precise author edits. We present chart-plot, an agentic harness that closes this last mile through three components: (1) a style-aware code generator conditioned on a textual style skill distilled from accepted figures at the target venue, (2) a deployment-aware render loop that compiles the chart inside the target LaTeX context and revises until layout constraints are met, and (3) a structured edit layer that exposes every chart element as a directly manipulable handle. We report early results on three chart-type case studies (grouped bar, scaling line, paired distributions) and a small user study.

Problem

• chart publication
• academic chart generation
• layout constraints
• style consistency
• author editing

Innovation

• chart generation
• style-aware code generation
• LaTeX-aware rendering
• structured editing interface
• publication-ready visualization