DomainCQA: Crafting Expert-Level QA from Domain-Specific Charts

Chart Question Answering (CQA) benchmarks are essential for evaluating the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to interpret visual data. However, current benchmarks focus primarily on the evaluation of general-purpose CQA but fail to adequately capture domain-specific challenges. We introduce DomainCQA, a systematic methodology for constructing domain-specific CQA benchmarks, and demonstrate its effectiveness by developing AstroChart, a CQA benchmark in the field of astronomy. Our evaluation shows that current MLLMs face fundamental challenges in vision-language alignment and domain adaptation, highlighting a critical gap in current benchmarks. By providing a scalable and rigorous framework, DomainCQA enables more precise assessment and improvement of MLLMs for domain-specific applications.