Hierarchical Visual Agent: Managing Contexts in Joint Image-Text Space for Advanced Chart Reasoning

2026-05-05

Abstract

Advanced chart question answering requires both precise perception of small visual elements and multi-step reasoning across several subplots. While existing MLLMs are strong at understanding single plots, they often struggle with multi-step reasoning across multiple subplots. We propose HierVA, a hierarchical visual agent framework for chart reasoning that iteratively constructs and updates a working context in a joint image--text space. A high-level manager generates plans and maintains a compact context containing only key information, while specialized workers perform reasoning, gather evidence, and return results. In particular, the agent maintains separate visual and textual contexts, using a zoom-in tool to restrict the visual context. Experiments on the CharXiv reasoning subset demonstrate consistent improvements over strong multimodal baselines, and ablation studies verify that hierarchical architecture, scoped visual context, and distilled context contribute complementary gains.

Problem

• chart reasoning
• multi-step reasoning
• multimodal language models
• visual context
• subplot understanding

Innovation

• hierarchical visual agent
• joint image-text space
• scoped visual context
• multi-step chart reasoning
• context distillation