Does visualization help AI understand data?

Keywords

AI, Workflow Design, Human-Machine Analysis.

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.