External index: 📚 visualization knowledge base — cross-disciplinary plotting libs / style guides / palettes / domain ecosystems

🔥 Stress-test subset

22 hand-picked references for stress-testing whether an agent (Claude / Codex / etc.) can reproduce paper-grade style under visually complex conditions: corner plots, multi-element overlays, inset zooms, custom colorbars, log-log scaling, 3D, polar, lattice physics errorbar layouts, distributional RL, etc. Trivial single-line plots are excluded — those don't exercise style-transfer capability.

Mix: arXiv real-paper figures (✓ true top-conference aesthetic, may not ship full mpl code) + ChartMimic complex composites (✓ ship full matplotlib code). Each card explains why it's a stress test.

"Code-runnable" criterion: the figure must be reproducible by matplotlib given hypothetical numerical data — i.e. line/scatter/bar/heatmap/contour/imshow on data arrays. Figures requiring real-world JPEG photos (e.g. ImageNet samples) or raw photographic content are excluded — those aren't code-only-drawable. Astronomical/physics image data (numerical arrays displayed via imshow) is code-drawable and stays in.

arXiv 2001.08361

Scaling Laws — 4-panel viridis line+scatter with shared colorbar; classic OpenAI paper aesthetic

arXiv:2001.08361

arXiv 1807.06205

Planck cosmology — corner triangle plot of cosmological posteriors; specialty layout

arXiv:1807.06205

arXiv 1609.00667

NuSTAR Galactic Center — sky map + spectrum + multi-region contour overlay

arXiv:1609.00667

arXiv 1701.06538

MoE scaling — log-log line plot with letter-style data markers (LL, MM, FF) — distinctive

arXiv:1701.06538

arXiv 1707.06887

C51 distributional RL — training curves + 4-color distribution panels

arXiv:1707.06887

arXiv 1710.10044

QR-DQN — quantile distribution + step CDF + score curves

arXiv:1710.10044

arXiv 1712.09913

Loss Landscape — concentric contour lines + multi-line VGG curves

arXiv:1712.09913

arXiv 1905.13638

Atom lattice physics — colored atom grid + heatmap + dot pattern

arXiv:1905.13638

arXiv 2006.16224

Lattice QCD — errorbar curves + lattice scatter w/ scale-attached labels

arXiv:2006.16224

arXiv 2007.08765

Quantum dynamics — multi-curve τ vs D + circular jet field with diverging cmap

arXiv:2007.08765

arXiv 1907.08787

Red density contour + multi-line sigmoid curves — physics paper aesthetic

arXiv:1907.08787

arXiv 2102.11111

HEP calorimeter — colored radial detector + multi-method scatter

arXiv:2102.11111

arXiv 0711.3008

Galactic ECDF — sparse spiral arms + single-color cumulative curve

arXiv:0711.3008

arXiv 1908.00519

NGC 5466 — CMD scatter + ECDF + errorbar (BSS vs HB) — astro classic

arXiv:1908.00519

arXiv 2302.13971

LLaMA training loss + 6-game multi-line scaling curves

arXiv:2302.13971

CM CB__112

Composite — density plot + box plot 2-panel, restrained palette

ChartMimic / CB__112

CM cust_HR__53

Spiral plot — radial gradient single hue, distinctive composition

ChartMimic / cust_HR__53

CM r2_3d__43

3D multi-class scatter — 3 marker types, proper perspective

ChartMimic / r2_3d__43

CM cust_3d__28

3D surface — Presidential approval, RdBu cmap on terrain

ChartMimic / cust_3d__28

CM cust_radar__30

3-panel radar comparison — multi-axis composition

ChartMimic / cust_radar__30

CM spider_8dim__llm

8-dim LLM capability radar — 3 models overlaid on one polar axis (visual signature inspired by PaLM spider_plot2)

ChartMimic / spider_8dim__llm

CM heatmap__112

Diverging-cmap scientific heatmap — temperature data layout

ChartMimic / heatmap__112

arXivReal top-conference paper style references

44 strong PASS + 8 partial PASS from manual audit of ~105 arXiv source bundles I downloaded earlier. These are real top-conference paper figures (NeurIPS / ICLR / Nature / PRL / ApJ / etc.), not curated benchmarks. Code is not always shipped — they're for style transfer use, not reproduction. Each thumb shows first 4 figures of the paper; click arXiv link for full PDF.