arXiv:2506.15084cs.SEcs.CV2025-06被引 6

首次系统分析数据可视化库中的缺陷,揭示图形计算错误是主因。

An Empirical Study of Bugs in Data Visualization Libraries

  • 收集564个缺陷,归纳出8个触发步骤和2种专用测试标准
  • 图形计算错误导致不准确图表,影响用户决策
  • 视觉语言模型检测效果仅29%~57%,提示需优化提示工程

数据可视化(DataViz)库在展示、数据分析和应用开发中至关重要,其准确性直接影响信息传达与用户决策。错误的可视化可能不引发崩溃,却会误导用户,造成误判。本研究首次对五个主流数据可视化库中的564个缺陷进行全面分析,系统梳理其症状与根本原因,提出详细分类体系。研究发现,不准确的图表普遍存在,主要根源为图形计算错误,亟需自动化测试方法。此外,识别出8个典型触发步骤及2类针对数据可视化的特有测试判定标准,为未来自动化测试研究提供方向。结合视觉语言模型(VLMs)的探索表明,其在检测不准确图表上的效果介于29%至57%之间,且增加提示信息并不必然提升效果。更多发现详见论文原文。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Data visualization (DataViz) libraries play a crucial role in presentation, data analysis, and application development, underscoring the importance of their accuracy in transforming data into visual representations. Incorrect visualizations can adversely impact user experience, distort information conveyance, and influence user perception and decision-making processes. Visual bugs in these libraries can be particularly insidious as they may not cause obvious errors like crashes, but instead mislead users of the underlying data graphically, resulting in wrong decision making. Consequently, a good understanding of the unique characteristics of bugs in DataViz libraries is essential for researchers and developers to detect and fix bugs in DataViz libraries. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of bugs in DataViz libraries, examining 564 bugs collected from five widely-used libraries. Our study systematically analyzes their symptoms and root causes, and provides a detailed taxonomy. We found that incorrect/inaccurate plots are pervasive in DataViz libraries and incorrect graphic computation is the major root cause, which necessitates further automated testing methods for DataViz libraries. Moreover, we identified eight key steps to trigger such bugs and two test oracles specific to DataViz libraries, which may inspire future research in designing effective automated testing techniques. Furthermore, with the recent advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs), we explored the feasibility of applying these models to detect incorrect/inaccurate plots. The results show that the effectiveness of VLMs in bug detection varies from 29% to 57%, depending on the prompts, and adding more information in prompts does not necessarily increase the effectiveness. More findings can be found in our manuscript.

数据可视化缺陷分析自动化测试视觉语言模型

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