MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose a set of pretraining tasks to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. We initialize with Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model and continue pretraining with our proposed objectives. We argue that numerical reasoning and plot deconstruction enable a model with the key capabilities of (1) extracting key information and (2) reasoning on the extracted information. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, our continually pretrained MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as ~20%. We also examine how well does MatCha pretraining transfer to domains such as screenshot, textbook, and poster figures. We observe improvement over the base Pix2Struct checkpoint by 1.2% on average, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.