Demonstrating chart-plot: Closing the Last Mile of Academic Chart Generation

Abstract: LLMs can translate a researcher's intent into runnable matplotlib code, yet the resulting chart rarely lands in a paper without multiple rounds of manual revision. We argue that the open problem is not chart code generation but chart publication: making the output look like a top-venue figure, survive the target layout, and respond to precise author edits. We present chart-plot, an agentic harness that closes this last mile through three components: (1) a style-aware code generator conditioned on a textual style skill distilled from accepted figures at the target venue, (2) a deployment-aware render loop that compiles the chart inside the target LaTeX context and revises until layout constraints are met, and (3) a structured edit layer that exposes every chart element as a directly manipulable handle. We report early results on three chart-type case studies (grouped bar, scaling line, paired distributions) and a small user study.