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SubscribeAutoHAS: Efficient Hyperparameter and Architecture Search
Efficient hyperparameter or architecture search methods have shown remarkable results, but each of them is only applicable to searching for either hyperparameters (HPs) or architectures. In this work, we propose a unified pipeline, AutoHAS, to efficiently search for both architectures and hyperparameters. AutoHAS learns to alternately update the shared network weights and a reinforcement learning (RL) controller, which learns the probability distribution for the architecture candidates and HP candidates. A temporary weight is introduced to store the updated weight from the selected HPs (by the controller), and a validation accuracy based on this temporary weight serves as a reward to update the controller. In experiments, we show AutoHAS is efficient and generalizable to different search spaces, baselines and datasets. In particular, AutoHAS can improve the accuracy over popular network architectures, such as ResNet and EfficientNet, on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and four more other datasets.
A Large-scale Dataset for Audio-Language Representation Learning
The AI community has made significant strides in developing powerful foundation models, driven by large-scale multimodal datasets. However, in the audio representation learning community, the present audio-language datasets suffer from limitations such as insufficient volume, simplistic content, and arduous collection procedures. To tackle these challenges, we present an innovative and automatic audio caption generation pipeline based on a series of public tools or APIs, and construct a large-scale, high-quality, audio-language dataset, named as Auto-ACD, comprising over 1.9M audio-text pairs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset, we train popular models on our dataset and show performance improvement on various downstream tasks, namely, audio-language retrieval, audio captioning, environment classification. In addition, we establish a novel test set and provide a benchmark for audio-text tasks. The proposed dataset will be released at https://auto-acd.github.io/.
Never Train from Scratch: Fair Comparison of Long-Sequence Models Requires Data-Driven Priors
Modeling long-range dependencies across sequences is a longstanding goal in machine learning and has led to architectures, such as state space models, that dramatically outperform Transformers on long sequences. However, these impressive empirical gains have been by and large demonstrated on benchmarks (e.g. Long Range Arena), where models are randomly initialized and trained to predict a target label from an input sequence. In this work, we show that random initialization leads to gross overestimation of the differences between architectures and that pretraining with standard denoising objectives, using only the downstream task data, leads to dramatic gains across multiple architectures and to very small gaps between Transformers and state space models (SSMs). In stark contrast to prior works, we find vanilla Transformers to match the performance of S4 on Long Range Arena when properly pretrained, and we improve the best reported results of SSMs on the PathX-256 task by 20 absolute points. Subsequently, we analyze the utility of previously-proposed structured parameterizations for SSMs and show they become mostly redundant in the presence of data-driven initialization obtained through pretraining. Our work shows that, when evaluating different architectures on supervised tasks, incorporation of data-driven priors via pretraining is essential for reliable performance estimation, and can be done efficiently.
Easy2Hard-Bench: Standardized Difficulty Labels for Profiling LLM Performance and Generalization
While generalization over tasks from easy to hard is crucial to profile language models (LLMs), the datasets with fine-grained difficulty annotations for each problem across a broad range of complexity are still blank. Aiming to address this limitation, we present Easy2Hard-Bench, a consistently formatted collection of 6 benchmark datasets spanning various domains, such as mathematics and programming problems, chess puzzles, and reasoning questions. Each problem within these datasets is annotated with numerical difficulty scores. To systematically estimate problem difficulties, we collect abundant performance data on attempts to each problem by humans in the real world or LLMs on the prominent leaderboard. Leveraging the rich performance data, we apply well-established difficulty ranking systems, such as Item Response Theory (IRT) and Glicko-2 models, to uniformly assign numerical difficulty scores to problems. Moreover, datasets in Easy2Hard-Bench distinguish themselves from previous collections by a higher proportion of challenging problems. Through extensive experiments with six state-of-the-art LLMs, we provide a comprehensive analysis of their performance and generalization capabilities across varying levels of difficulty, with the aim of inspiring future research in LLM generalization. The datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/furonghuang-lab/Easy2Hard-Bench.
DrivAerNet++: A Large-Scale Multimodal Car Dataset with Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Deep Learning Benchmarks
We present DrivAerNet++, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal dataset for aerodynamic car design. DrivAerNet++ comprises 8,000 diverse car designs modeled with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The dataset includes diverse car configurations such as fastback, notchback, and estateback, with different underbody and wheel designs to represent both internal combustion engines and electric vehicles. Each entry in the dataset features detailed 3D meshes, parametric models, aerodynamic coefficients, and extensive flow and surface field data, along with segmented parts for car classification and point cloud data. This dataset supports a wide array of machine learning applications including data-driven design optimization, generative modeling, surrogate model training, CFD simulation acceleration, and geometric classification. With more than 39 TB of publicly available engineering data, DrivAerNet++ fills a significant gap in available resources, providing high-quality, diverse data to enhance model training, promote generalization, and accelerate automotive design processes. Along with rigorous dataset validation, we also provide ML benchmarking results on the task of aerodynamic drag prediction, showcasing the breadth of applications supported by our dataset. This dataset is set to significantly impact automotive design and broader engineering disciplines by fostering innovation and improving the fidelity of aerodynamic evaluations.
AutoGUI: Scaling GUI Grounding with Automatic Functionality Annotations from LLMs
User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.
Auto-Sklearn 2.0: Hands-free AutoML via Meta-Learning
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) supports practitioners and researchers with the tedious task of designing machine learning pipelines and has recently achieved substantial success. In this paper, we introduce new AutoML approaches motivated by our winning submission to the second ChaLearn AutoML challenge. We develop PoSH Auto-sklearn, which enables AutoML systems to work well on large datasets under rigid time limits by using a new, simple and meta-feature-free meta-learning technique and by employing a successful bandit strategy for budget allocation. However, PoSH Auto-sklearn introduces even more ways of running AutoML and might make it harder for users to set it up correctly. Therefore, we also go one step further and study the design space of AutoML itself, proposing a solution towards truly hands-free AutoML. Together, these changes give rise to the next generation of our AutoML system, Auto-sklearn 2.0. We verify the improvements by these additions in an extensive experimental study on 39 AutoML benchmark datasets. We conclude the paper by comparing to other popular AutoML frameworks and Auto-sklearn 1.0, reducing the relative error by up to a factor of 4.5, and yielding a performance in 10 minutes that is substantially better than what Auto-sklearn 1.0 achieves within an hour.
AutoBencher: Creating Salient, Novel, Difficult Datasets for Language Models
Evaluation is critical for assessing capabilities, tracking scientific progress, and informing model selection. In this paper, we present three desiderata for a good benchmark for language models: (i) salience (e.g., knowledge about World War II is more salient than a random day in history), (ii) novelty (i.e., the benchmark reveals new trends in model rankings not shown by previous benchmarks), and (iii) difficulty (i.e., the benchmark should be difficult for existing models, leaving headroom for future improvement). We operationalize these three desiderata and cast benchmark creation as a search problem, that of finding benchmarks that that satisfy all three desiderata. To tackle this search problem, we present AutoBencher, which uses a language model to automatically search for datasets that meet the three desiderata. AutoBencher uses privileged information (e.g. relevant documents) to construct reliable datasets, and adaptivity with reranking to optimize for the search objective. We use AutoBencher to create datasets for math, multilingual, and knowledge-intensive question answering. The scalability of AutoBencher allows it to test fine-grained categories and tail knowledge, creating datasets that are on average 27% more novel and 22% more difficult than existing benchmarks. A closer investigation of our constructed datasets shows that we can identify specific gaps in LM knowledge in language models that are not captured by existing benchmarks, such as Gemini Pro performing much worse on question answering about the Permian Extinction and Fordism, while OpenAGI-7B performing surprisingly well on QA about COVID-19.
RDD2022: A multi-national image dataset for automatic Road Damage Detection
The data article describes the Road Damage Dataset, RDD2022, which comprises 47,420 road images from six countries, Japan, India, the Czech Republic, Norway, the United States, and China. The images have been annotated with more than 55,000 instances of road damage. Four types of road damage, namely longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes, are captured in the dataset. The annotated dataset is envisioned for developing deep learning-based methods to detect and classify road damage automatically. The dataset has been released as a part of the Crowd sensing-based Road Damage Detection Challenge (CRDDC2022). The challenge CRDDC2022 invites researchers from across the globe to propose solutions for automatic road damage detection in multiple countries. The municipalities and road agencies may utilize the RDD2022 dataset, and the models trained using RDD2022 for low-cost automatic monitoring of road conditions. Further, computer vision and machine learning researchers may use the dataset to benchmark the performance of different algorithms for other image-based applications of the same type (classification, object detection, etc.).
DCA-Bench: A Benchmark for Dataset Curation Agents
The quality of datasets plays an increasingly crucial role in the research and development of modern artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the proliferation of open dataset platforms nowadays, data quality issues, such as insufficient documentation, inaccurate annotations, and ethical concerns, remain common in datasets widely used in AI. Furthermore, these issues are often subtle and difficult to be detected by rule-based scripts, requiring expensive manual identification and verification by dataset users or maintainers. With the increasing capability of large language models (LLMs), it is promising to streamline the curation of datasets with LLM agents. In this work, as the initial step towards this goal, we propose a dataset curation agent benchmark, DCA-Bench, to measure LLM agents' capability of detecting hidden dataset quality issues. Specifically, we collect diverse real-world dataset quality issues from eight open dataset platforms as a testbed. Additionally, to establish an automatic pipeline for evaluating the success of LLM agents, which requires a nuanced understanding of the agent outputs, we implement a dedicated Evaluator using another LLM agent. We demonstrate that the LLM-based Evaluator empirically aligns well with human evaluation, allowing reliable automatic evaluation on the proposed benchmark. We further conduct experiments on several baseline LLM agents on the proposed benchmark and demonstrate the complexity of the task, indicating that applying LLMs to real-world dataset curation still requires further in-depth exploration and innovation. Finally, the proposed benchmark can also serve as a testbed for measuring the capability of LLMs in problem discovery rather than just problem-solving. The benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/TRAIS-Lab/dca-bench.
DataFinder: Scientific Dataset Recommendation from Natural Language Descriptions
Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.
ANNA: A Deep Learning Based Dataset in Heterogeneous Traffic for Autonomous Vehicles
Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence offer tremendous promise for the development of self-driving applications. Deep Neural Networks, in particular, are being utilized to support the operation of semi-autonomous cars through object identification and semantic segmentation. To assess the inadequacy of the current dataset in the context of autonomous and semi-autonomous cars, we created a new dataset named ANNA. This study discusses a custom-built dataset that includes some unidentified vehicles in the perspective of Bangladesh, which are not included in the existing dataset. A dataset validity check was performed by evaluating models using the Intersection Over Union (IOU) metric. The results demonstrated that the model trained on our custom dataset was more precise and efficient than the models trained on the KITTI or COCO dataset concerning Bangladeshi traffic. The research presented in this paper also emphasizes the importance of developing accurate and efficient object detection algorithms for the advancement of autonomous vehicles.
RACECAR -- The Dataset for High-Speed Autonomous Racing
This paper describes the first open dataset for full-scale and high-speed autonomous racing. Multi-modal sensor data has been collected from fully autonomous Indy race cars operating at speeds of up to 170 mph (273 kph). Six teams who raced in the Indy Autonomous Challenge have contributed to this dataset. The dataset spans 11 interesting racing scenarios across two race tracks which include solo laps, multi-agent laps, overtaking situations, high-accelerations, banked tracks, obstacle avoidance, pit entry and exit at different speeds. The dataset contains data from 27 racing sessions across the 11 scenarios with over 6.5 hours of sensor data recorded from the track. The data is organized and released in both ROS2 and nuScenes format. We have also developed the ROS2-to-nuScenes conversion library to achieve this. The RACECAR data is unique because of the high-speed environment of autonomous racing. We present several benchmark problems on localization, object detection and tracking (LiDAR, Radar, and Camera), and mapping using the RACECAR data to explore issues that arise at the limits of operation of the vehicle.
A Scalable AutoML Approach Based on Graph Neural Networks
AutoML systems build machine learning models automatically by performing a search over valid data transformations and learners, along with hyper-parameter optimization for each learner. Many AutoML systems use meta-learning to guide search for optimal pipelines. In this work, we present a novel meta-learning system called KGpip which, (1) builds a database of datasets and corresponding pipelines by mining thousands of scripts with program analysis, (2) uses dataset embeddings to find similar datasets in the database based on its content instead of metadata-based features, (3) models AutoML pipeline creation as a graph generation problem, to succinctly characterize the diverse pipelines seen for a single dataset. KGpip's meta-learning is a sub-component for AutoML systems. We demonstrate this by integrating KGpip with two AutoML systems. Our comprehensive evaluation using 126 datasets, including those used by the state-of-the-art systems, shows that KGpip significantly outperforms these systems.
Resource-Aware Pareto-Optimal Automated Machine Learning Platform
In this study, we introduce a novel platform Resource-Aware AutoML (RA-AutoML) which enables flexible and generalized algorithms to build machine learning models subjected to multiple objectives, as well as resource and hard-ware constraints. RA-AutoML intelligently conducts Hyper-Parameter Search(HPS) as well as Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to build models optimizing predefined objectives. RA-AutoML is a versatile framework that allows user to prescribe many resource/hardware constraints along with objectives demanded by the problem at hand or business requirements. At its core, RA-AutoML relies on our in-house search-engine algorithm,MOBOGA, which combines a modified constraint-aware Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Algorithm to construct Pareto optimal candidates. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset shows very good accuracy compared to results obtained by state-of-art neural network models, while subjected to resource constraints in the form of model size.
IDD-3D: Indian Driving Dataset for 3D Unstructured Road Scenes
Autonomous driving and assistance systems rely on annotated data from traffic and road scenarios to model and learn the various object relations in complex real-world scenarios. Preparation and training of deploy-able deep learning architectures require the models to be suited to different traffic scenarios and adapt to different situations. Currently, existing datasets, while large-scale, lack such diversities and are geographically biased towards mainly developed cities. An unstructured and complex driving layout found in several developing countries such as India poses a challenge to these models due to the sheer degree of variations in the object types, densities, and locations. To facilitate better research toward accommodating such scenarios, we build a new dataset, IDD-3D, which consists of multi-modal data from multiple cameras and LiDAR sensors with 12k annotated driving LiDAR frames across various traffic scenarios. We discuss the need for this dataset through statistical comparisons with existing datasets and highlight benchmarks on standard 3D object detection and tracking tasks in complex layouts. Code and data available at https://github.com/shubham1810/idd3d_kit.git
Auto-PyTorch Tabular: Multi-Fidelity MetaLearning for Efficient and Robust AutoDL
While early AutoML frameworks focused on optimizing traditional ML pipelines and their hyperparameters, a recent trend in AutoML is to focus on neural architecture search. In this paper, we introduce Auto-PyTorch, which brings the best of these two worlds together by jointly and robustly optimizing the architecture of networks and the training hyperparameters to enable fully automated deep learning (AutoDL). Auto-PyTorch achieves state-of-the-art performance on several tabular benchmarks by combining multi-fidelity optimization with portfolio construction for warmstarting and ensembling of deep neural networks (DNNs) and common baselines for tabular data. To thoroughly study our assumptions on how to design such an AutoDL system, we additionally introduce a new benchmark on learning curves for DNNs, dubbed LCBench, and run extensive ablation studies of the full Auto-PyTorch on typical AutoML benchmarks, eventually showing that Auto-PyTorch performs better than several state-of-the-art competitors on average.
METEOR:A Dense, Heterogeneous, and Unstructured Traffic Dataset With Rare Behaviors
We present a new traffic dataset, METEOR, which captures traffic patterns and multi-agent driving behaviors in unstructured scenarios. METEOR consists of more than 1000 one-minute videos, over 2 million annotated frames with bounding boxes and GPS trajectories for 16 unique agent categories, and more than 13 million bounding boxes for traffic agents. METEOR is a dataset for rare and interesting, multi-agent driving behaviors that are grouped into traffic violations, atypical interactions, and diverse scenarios. Every video in METEOR is tagged using a diverse range of factors corresponding to weather, time of the day, road conditions, and traffic density. We use METEOR to benchmark perception methods for object detection and multi-agent behavior prediction. Our key finding is that state-of-the-art models for object detection and behavior prediction, which otherwise succeed on existing datasets such as Waymo, fail on the METEOR dataset. METEOR marks the first step towards the development of more sophisticated perception models for dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured scenarios.
AlphaStar Unplugged: Large-Scale Offline Reinforcement Learning
StarCraft II is one of the most challenging simulated reinforcement learning environments; it is partially observable, stochastic, multi-agent, and mastering StarCraft II requires strategic planning over long time horizons with real-time low-level execution. It also has an active professional competitive scene. StarCraft II is uniquely suited for advancing offline RL algorithms, both because of its challenging nature and because Blizzard has released a massive dataset of millions of StarCraft II games played by human players. This paper leverages that and establishes a benchmark, called AlphaStar Unplugged, introducing unprecedented challenges for offline reinforcement learning. We define a dataset (a subset of Blizzard's release), tools standardizing an API for machine learning methods, and an evaluation protocol. We also present baseline agents, including behavior cloning, offline variants of actor-critic and MuZero. We improve the state of the art of agents using only offline data, and we achieve 90% win rate against previously published AlphaStar behavior cloning agent.
BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning
Datasets drive vision progress, yet existing driving datasets are impoverished in terms of visual content and supported tasks to study multitask learning for autonomous driving. Researchers are usually constrained to study a small set of problems on one dataset, while real-world computer vision applications require performing tasks of various complexities. We construct BDD100K, the largest driving video dataset with 100K videos and 10 tasks to evaluate the exciting progress of image recognition algorithms on autonomous driving. The dataset possesses geographic, environmental, and weather diversity, which is useful for training models that are less likely to be surprised by new conditions. Based on this diverse dataset, we build a benchmark for heterogeneous multitask learning and study how to solve the tasks together. Our experiments show that special training strategies are needed for existing models to perform such heterogeneous tasks. BDD100K opens the door for future studies in this important venue.
CoVLA: Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action Dataset for Autonomous Driving
Autonomous driving, particularly navigating complex and unanticipated scenarios, demands sophisticated reasoning and planning capabilities. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising avenue for this, their use has been largely confined to understanding complex environmental contexts or generating high-level driving commands, with few studies extending their application to end-to-end path planning. A major research bottleneck is the lack of large-scale annotated datasets encompassing vision, language, and action. To address this issue, we propose CoVLA (Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action) Dataset, an extensive dataset comprising real-world driving videos spanning more than 80 hours. This dataset leverages a novel, scalable approach based on automated data processing and a caption generation pipeline to generate accurate driving trajectories paired with detailed natural language descriptions of driving environments and maneuvers. This approach utilizes raw in-vehicle sensor data, allowing it to surpass existing datasets in scale and annotation richness. Using CoVLA, we investigate the driving capabilities of MLLMs that can handle vision, language, and action in a variety of driving scenarios. Our results illustrate the strong proficiency of our model in generating coherent language and action outputs, emphasizing the potential of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in the field of autonomous driving. This dataset establishes a framework for robust, interpretable, and data-driven autonomous driving systems by providing a comprehensive platform for training and evaluating VLA models, contributing to safer and more reliable self-driving vehicles. The dataset is released for academic purpose.
D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning
The offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting (also known as full batch RL), where a policy is learned from a static dataset, is compelling as progress enables RL methods to take advantage of large, previously-collected datasets, much like how the rise of large datasets has fueled results in supervised learning. However, existing online RL benchmarks are not tailored towards the offline setting and existing offline RL benchmarks are restricted to data generated by partially-trained agents, making progress in offline RL difficult to measure. In this work, we introduce benchmarks specifically designed for the offline setting, guided by key properties of datasets relevant to real-world applications of offline RL. With a focus on dataset collection, examples of such properties include: datasets generated via hand-designed controllers and human demonstrators, multitask datasets where an agent performs different tasks in the same environment, and datasets collected with mixtures of policies. By moving beyond simple benchmark tasks and data collected by partially-trained RL agents, we reveal important and unappreciated deficiencies of existing algorithms. To facilitate research, we have released our benchmark tasks and datasets with a comprehensive evaluation of existing algorithms, an evaluation protocol, and open-source examples. This serves as a common starting point for the community to identify shortcomings in existing offline RL methods and a collaborative route for progress in this emerging area.
Shopping Queries Dataset: A Large-Scale ESCI Benchmark for Improving Product Search
Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.
Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Dataset and Challenge
This paper presents the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Dataset and Challenge, designed to support research in traffic event analysis, collision prediction, and autonomous vehicle safety. The dataset consists of 1,500 annotated video clips, each approximately 40 seconds long, capturing a diverse range of real-world traffic scenarios. Videos are labeled with event type (collision/near-collision vs. normal driving), environmental conditions (lighting conditions and weather), and scene type (urban, rural, highway, etc.). For collision and near-collision cases, additional temporal labels are provided, including the precise moment of the event and the alert time, marking when the collision first becomes predictable. To advance research on accident prediction, we introduce the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Challenge, a public competition on top of this dataset. Participants are tasked with developing machine learning models that predict the likelihood of an imminent collision, given an input video. Model performance is evaluated using the average precision (AP) computed across multiple intervals before the accident (i.e. 500 ms, 1000 ms, and 1500 ms prior to the event), emphasizing the importance of early and reliable predictions. The dataset is released under an open license with restrictions on unethical use, ensuring responsible research and innovation.
A Configurable Library for Generating and Manipulating Maze Datasets
Understanding how machine learning models respond to distributional shifts is a key research challenge. Mazes serve as an excellent testbed due to varied generation algorithms offering a nuanced platform to simulate both subtle and pronounced distributional shifts. To enable systematic investigations of model behavior on out-of-distribution data, we present maze-dataset, a comprehensive library for generating, processing, and visualizing datasets consisting of maze-solving tasks. With this library, researchers can easily create datasets, having extensive control over the generation algorithm used, the parameters fed to the algorithm of choice, and the filters that generated mazes must satisfy. Furthermore, it supports multiple output formats, including rasterized and text-based, catering to convolutional neural networks and autoregressive transformer models. These formats, along with tools for visualizing and converting between them, ensure versatility and adaptability in research applications.
Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph
Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial in modern enterprises and billion-dollar business. Traditionally, technical experts like database administrators would manually prepare BI-models (e.g., in star or snowflake schemas) that join tables in data warehouses, before less-technical business users can run analytics using end-user dashboarding tools. However, the popularity of self-service BI (e.g., Tableau and Power-BI) in recent years creates a strong demand for less technical end-users to build BI-models themselves. We develop an Auto-BI system that can accurately predict BI models given a set of input tables, using a principled graph-based optimization problem we propose called k-Min-Cost-Arborescence (k-MCA), which holistically considers both local join prediction and global schema-graph structures, leveraging a graph-theoretical structure called arborescence. While we prove k-MCA is intractable and inapproximate in general, we develop novel algorithms that can solve k-MCA optimally, which is shown to be efficient in practice with sub-second latency and can scale to the largest BI-models we encounter (with close to 100 tables). Auto-BI is rigorously evaluated on a unique dataset with over 100K real BI models we harvested, as well as on 4 popular TPC benchmarks. It is shown to be both efficient and accurate, achieving over 0.9 F1-score on both real and synthetic benchmarks.
Automatic Data Curation for Self-Supervised Learning: A Clustering-Based Approach
Self-supervised features are the cornerstone of modern machine learning systems. They are typically pre-trained on data collections whose construction and curation typically require extensive human effort. This manual process has some limitations similar to those encountered in supervised learning, e.g., the crowd-sourced selection of data is costly and time-consuming, preventing scaling the dataset size. In this work, we consider the problem of automatic curation of high-quality datasets for self-supervised pre-training. We posit that such datasets should be large, diverse and balanced, and propose a clustering-based approach for building ones satisfying all these criteria. Our method involves successive and hierarchical applications of k-means on a large and diverse data repository to obtain clusters that distribute uniformly among data concepts, followed by a hierarchical, balanced sampling step from these clusters. Extensive experiments on three different data domains including web-based images, satellite images and text show that features trained on our automatically curated datasets outperform those trained on uncurated data while being on par or better than ones trained on manually curated data.
KAXAI: An Integrated Environment for Knowledge Analysis and Explainable AI
In order to fully harness the potential of machine learning, it is crucial to establish a system that renders the field more accessible and less daunting for individuals who may not possess a comprehensive understanding of its intricacies. The paper describes the design of a system that integrates AutoML, XAI, and synthetic data generation to provide a great UX design for users. The system allows users to navigate and harness the power of machine learning while abstracting its complexities and providing high usability. The paper proposes two novel classifiers, Logistic Regression Forest and Support Vector Tree, for enhanced model performance, achieving 96\% accuracy on a diabetes dataset and 93\% on a survey dataset. The paper also introduces a model-dependent local interpreter called MEDLEY and evaluates its interpretation against LIME, Greedy, and Parzen. Additionally, the paper introduces LLM-based synthetic data generation, library-based data generation, and enhancing the original dataset with GAN. The findings on synthetic data suggest that enhancing the original dataset with GAN is the most reliable way to generate synthetic data, as evidenced by KS tests, standard deviation, and feature importance. The authors also found that GAN works best for quantitative datasets.
AutoML: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art
Deep learning (DL) techniques have penetrated all aspects of our lives and brought us great convenience. However, building a high-quality DL system for a specific task highly relies on human expertise, hindering the applications of DL to more areas. Automated machine learning (AutoML) becomes a promising solution to build a DL system without human assistance, and a growing number of researchers focus on AutoML. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in AutoML. First, we introduce AutoML methods according to the pipeline, covering data preparation, feature engineering, hyperparameter optimization, and neural architecture search (NAS). We focus more on NAS, as it is currently very hot sub-topic of AutoML. We summarize the performance of the representative NAS algorithms on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets and further discuss several worthy studying directions of NAS methods: one/two-stage NAS, one-shot NAS, and joint hyperparameter and architecture optimization. Finally, we discuss some open problems of the existing AutoML methods for future research.
TabRepo: A Large Scale Repository of Tabular Model Evaluations and its AutoML Applications
We introduce TabRepo, a new dataset of tabular model evaluations and predictions. TabRepo contains the predictions and metrics of 1310 models evaluated on 200 classification and regression datasets. We illustrate the benefit of our dataset in multiple ways. First, we show that it allows to perform analysis such as comparing Hyperparameter Optimization against current AutoML systems while also considering ensembling at marginal cost by using precomputed model predictions. Second, we show that our dataset can be readily leveraged to perform transfer-learning. In particular, we show that applying standard transfer-learning techniques allows to outperform current state-of-the-art tabular systems in accuracy, runtime and latency.
RedPajama: an Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly becoming a cornerstone technology in artificial intelligence, the sciences, and society as a whole, yet the optimal strategies for dataset composition and filtering remain largely elusive. Many of the top-performing models lack transparency in their dataset curation and model development processes, posing an obstacle to the development of fully open language models. In this paper, we identify three core data-related challenges that must be addressed to advance open-source language models. These include (1) transparency in model development, including the data curation process, (2) access to large quantities of high-quality data, and (3) availability of artifacts and metadata for dataset curation and analysis. To address these challenges, we release RedPajama-V1, an open reproduction of the LLaMA training dataset. In addition, we release RedPajama-V2, a massive web-only dataset consisting of raw, unfiltered text data together with quality signals and metadata. Together, the RedPajama datasets comprise over 100 trillion tokens spanning multiple domains and with their quality signals facilitate the filtering of data, aiming to inspire the development of numerous new datasets. To date, these datasets have already been used in the training of strong language models used in production, such as Snowflake Arctic, Salesforce's XGen and AI2's OLMo. To provide insight into the quality of RedPajama, we present a series of analyses and ablation studies with decoder-only language models with up to 1.6B parameters. Our findings demonstrate how quality signals for web data can be effectively leveraged to curate high-quality subsets of the dataset, underscoring the potential of RedPajama to advance the development of transparent and high-performing language models at scale.
MIRAGE-Bench: Automatic Multilingual Benchmark Arena for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) benchmarks rely on different heuristic-based metrics for evaluation, but these require human preferences as ground truth for reference. In contrast, arena-based benchmarks, where two models compete each other, require an expensive Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge for a reliable evaluation. We present an easy and efficient technique to get the best of both worlds. The idea is to train a learning to rank model as a "surrogate" judge using RAG-based evaluation heuristics as input, to produce a synthetic arena-based leaderboard. Using this idea, We develop MIRAGE-Bench, a standardized arena-based multilingual RAG benchmark for 18 diverse languages on Wikipedia. The benchmark is constructed using MIRACL, a retrieval dataset, and extended for multilingual generation evaluation. MIRAGE-Bench evaluates RAG extensively coupling both heuristic features and LLM as a judge evaluator. In our work, we benchmark 19 diverse multilingual-focused LLMs, and achieve a high correlation (Kendall Tau (tau) = 0.909) using our surrogate judge learned using heuristic features with pairwise evaluations and between GPT-4o as a teacher on the MIRAGE-Bench leaderboard using the Bradley-Terry framework. We observe proprietary and large open-source LLMs currently dominate in multilingual RAG. MIRAGE-Bench is available at: https://github.com/vectara/mirage-bench.
A Topological Approach to Measuring Training Data Quality
Data quality is crucial for the successful training, generalization and performance of artificial intelligence models. Furthermore, it is known that the leading approaches in artificial intelligence are notoriously data-hungry. In this paper, we propose the use of small training datasets towards faster training. Specifically, we provide a novel topological method based on morphisms between persistence modules to measure the training data quality with respect to the complete dataset. This way, we can provide an explanation of why the chosen training dataset will lead to poor performance.
Benchmark Analysis of Various Pre-trained Deep Learning Models on ASSIRA Cats and Dogs Dataset
As the most basic application and implementation of deep learning, image classification has grown in popularity. Various datasets are provided by renowned data science communities for benchmarking machine learning algorithms and pre-trained models. The ASSIRA Cats & Dogs dataset is one of them and is being used in this research for its overall acceptance and benchmark standards. A comparison of various pre-trained models is demonstrated by using different types of optimizers and loss functions. Hyper-parameters are changed to gain the best result from a model. By applying this approach, we have got higher accuracy without major changes in the training model. To run the experiment, we used three different computer architectures: a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080Ti, and a desktop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090. The acquired results demonstrate supremacy in terms of accuracy over the previously done experiments on this dataset. From this experiment, the highest accuracy which is 99.65% is gained using the NASNet Large.
A Sanity Check for AI-generated Image Detection
With the rapid development of generative models, discerning AI-generated content has evoked increasing attention from both industry and academia. In this paper, we conduct a sanity check on "whether the task of AI-generated image detection has been solved". To start with, we present Chameleon dataset, consisting AIgenerated images that are genuinely challenging for human perception. To quantify the generalization of existing methods, we evaluate 9 off-the-shelf AI-generated image detectors on Chameleon dataset. Upon analysis, almost all models classify AI-generated images as real ones. Later, we propose AIDE (AI-generated Image DEtector with Hybrid Features), which leverages multiple experts to simultaneously extract visual artifacts and noise patterns. Specifically, to capture the high-level semantics, we utilize CLIP to compute the visual embedding. This effectively enables the model to discern AI-generated images based on semantics or contextual information; Secondly, we select the highest frequency patches and the lowest frequency patches in the image, and compute the low-level patchwise features, aiming to detect AI-generated images by low-level artifacts, for example, noise pattern, anti-aliasing, etc. While evaluating on existing benchmarks, for example, AIGCDetectBenchmark and GenImage, AIDE achieves +3.5% and +4.6% improvements to state-of-the-art methods, and on our proposed challenging Chameleon benchmarks, it also achieves the promising results, despite this problem for detecting AI-generated images is far from being solved. The dataset, codes, and pre-train models will be published at https://github.com/shilinyan99/AIDE.
HARDMath: A Benchmark Dataset for Challenging Problems in Applied Mathematics
Advanced applied mathematics problems are underrepresented in existing Large Language Model (LLM) benchmark datasets. To address this, we introduce HARDMath, a dataset inspired by a graduate course on asymptotic methods, featuring challenging applied mathematics problems that require analytical approximation techniques. These problems demand a combination of mathematical reasoning, computational tools, and subjective judgment, making them difficult for LLMs. Our framework auto-generates a large number of problems with solutions validated against numerical ground truths. We evaluate both open- and closed-source LLMs on HARDMath-mini, a sub-sampled test set of 366 problems, as well as on 40 word problems formulated in applied science contexts. Even leading closed-source models like GPT-4 achieve only 43.8% overall accuracy with few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting, and all models demonstrate significantly lower performance compared to results on existing mathematics benchmark datasets. We additionally conduct a detailed error analysis to gain insights into the failure cases of LLMs. These results demonstrate limitations of current LLM performance on advanced graduate-level applied math problems and underscore the importance of datasets like HARDMath to advance mathematical abilities of LLMs.
Are AI Detectors Good Enough? A Survey on Quality of Datasets With Machine-Generated Texts
The rapid development of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved the quality of generated texts, necessitating reliable machine-generated text detectors. A huge number of detectors and collections with AI fragments have emerged, and several detection methods even showed recognition quality up to 99.9% according to the target metrics in such collections. However, the quality of such detectors tends to drop dramatically in the wild, posing a question: Are detectors actually highly trustworthy or do their high benchmark scores come from the poor quality of evaluation datasets? In this paper, we emphasise the need for robust and qualitative methods for evaluating generated data to be secure against bias and low generalising ability of future model. We present a systematic review of datasets from competitions dedicated to AI-generated content detection and propose methods for evaluating the quality of datasets containing AI-generated fragments. In addition, we discuss the possibility of using high-quality generated data to achieve two goals: improving the training of detection models and improving the training datasets themselves. Our contribution aims to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics between human and machine text, which will ultimately support the integrity of information in an increasingly automated world.
Auto Arena of LLMs: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer-battles and Committee Discussions
As LLMs evolve on a daily basis, there is an urgent need for a trustworthy evaluation method that can provide robust evaluation results in a timely fashion. Currently, as static benchmarks are prone to contamination concerns, users tend to trust human voting platforms, such as Chatbot Arena. However, human annotations require extensive manual efforts. To provide an automatic, robust, and trustworthy evaluation framework, we innovatively propose the Auto-Arena of LLMs, which automates the entire evaluation process with LLM agents. Firstly, an examiner LLM devises queries. Then, a pair of candidate LLMs engage in a multi-round peer-battle around the query, during which the LLM's true performance gaps become visible. Finally, a committee of LLM judges collectively discuss and determine the winner, which alleviates bias and promotes fairness. In our extensive experiment on the 17 newest LLMs, Auto-Arena shows the highest correlation with human preferences, providing a promising alternative to human evaluation platforms.
Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Due to the importance of zero-shot learning, i.e. classifying images where there is a lack of labeled training data, the number of proposed approaches has recently increased steadily. We argue that it is time to take a step back and to analyze the status quo of the area. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, given the fact that there is no agreed upon zero-shot learning benchmark, we first define a new benchmark by unifying both the evaluation protocols and data splits of publicly available datasets used for this task. This is an important contribution as published results are often not comparable and sometimes even flawed due to, e.g. pre-training on zero-shot test classes. Moreover, we propose a new zero-shot learning dataset, the Animals with Attributes 2 (AWA2) dataset which we make publicly available both in terms of image features and the images themselves. Second, we compare and analyze a significant number of the state-of-the-art methods in depth, both in the classic zero-shot setting but also in the more realistic generalized zero-shot setting. Finally, we discuss in detail the limitations of the current status of the area which can be taken as a basis for advancing it.
Dataset Interfaces: Diagnosing Model Failures Using Controllable Counterfactual Generation
Distribution shifts are a major source of failure of deployed machine learning models. However, evaluating a model's reliability under distribution shifts can be challenging, especially since it may be difficult to acquire counterfactual examples that exhibit a specified shift. In this work, we introduce dataset interfaces: a framework which allows users to scalably synthesize such counterfactual examples from a given dataset. Specifically, we represent each class from the input dataset as a custom token within the text space of a text-to-image diffusion model. By incorporating these tokens into natural language prompts, we can then generate instantiations of objects in that dataset under desired distribution shifts. We demonstrate how applying our framework to the ImageNet dataset enables us to study model behavior across a diverse array of shifts, including variations in background, lighting, and attributes of the objects themselves. Code available at https://github.com/MadryLab/dataset-interfaces.
AutoKaggle: A Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous Data Science Competitions
Data science tasks involving tabular data present complex challenges that require sophisticated problem-solving approaches. We propose AutoKaggle, a powerful and user-centric framework that assists data scientists in completing daily data pipelines through a collaborative multi-agent system. AutoKaggle implements an iterative development process that combines code execution, debugging, and comprehensive unit testing to ensure code correctness and logic consistency. The framework offers highly customizable workflows, allowing users to intervene at each phase, thus integrating automated intelligence with human expertise. Our universal data science toolkit, comprising validated functions for data cleaning, feature engineering, and modeling, forms the foundation of this solution, enhancing productivity by streamlining common tasks. We selected 8 Kaggle competitions to simulate data processing workflows in real-world application scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that AutoKaggle achieves a validation submission rate of 0.85 and a comprehensive score of 0.82 in typical data science pipelines, fully proving its effectiveness and practicality in handling complex data science tasks.
ExcelFormer: Can a DNN be a Sure Bet for Tabular Prediction?
Data organized in tabular format is ubiquitous in real-world applications, and users often craft tables with biased feature definitions and flexibly set prediction targets of their interests. Thus, a rapid development of a robust, effective, dataset-versatile, user-friendly tabular prediction approach is highly desired. While Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively utilized by professional users, they present several challenges for casual users, particularly: (i) the dilemma of model selection due to their different dataset preferences, and (ii) the need for heavy hyperparameter searching, failing which their performances are deemed inadequate. In this paper, we delve into this question: Can we develop a deep learning model that serves as a "sure bet" solution for a wide range of tabular prediction tasks, while also being user-friendly for casual users? We delve into three key drawbacks of deep tabular models, encompassing: (P1) lack of rotational variance property, (P2) large data demand, and (P3) over-smooth solution. We propose ExcelFormer, addressing these challenges through a semi-permeable attention module that effectively constrains the influence of less informative features to break the DNNs' rotational invariance property (for P1), data augmentation approaches tailored for tabular data (for P2), and attentive feedforward network to boost the model fitting capability (for P3). These designs collectively make ExcelFormer a "sure bet" solution for diverse tabular datasets. Extensive and stratified experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous approaches across diverse tabular data prediction tasks, and this framework can be friendly to casual users, offering ease of use without the heavy hyperparameter tuning.
Towards Safer Operations: An Expert-involved Dataset of High-Pressure Gas Incidents for Preventing Future Failures
This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).
I am a Strange Dataset: Metalinguistic Tests for Language Models
Statements involving metalinguistic self-reference ("This paper has six sections.") are prevalent in many domains. Can large language models (LLMs) handle such language? In this paper, we present "I am a Strange Dataset", a new dataset for addressing this question. There are two subtasks: generation and verification. In generation, models continue statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is" (where a correct continuation is "is"). In verification, models judge the truth of statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is sentence." (false). We also provide minimally different metalinguistic non-self-reference examples to complement the main dataset by probing for whether models can handle metalinguistic language at all. The dataset is hand-crafted by experts and validated by non-expert annotators. We test a variety of open-source LLMs (7B to 70B parameters) as well as closed-source LLMs through APIs. All models perform close to chance across both subtasks and even on the non-self-referential metalinguistic control data, though we find some steady improvement with model scale. GPT 4 is the only model to consistently do significantly better than chance, and it is still only in the 60% range, while our untrained human annotators score well in the 89-93% range. The dataset and evaluation toolkit are available at https://github.com/TristanThrush/i-am-a-strange-dataset.
Named Entity Disambiguation using Deep Learning on Graphs
We tackle NED by comparing entities in short sentences with graphs. Creating a context vector from graphs through deep learning is a challenging problem that has never been applied to NED. Our main contribution is to present an experimental study of recent neural techniques, as well as a discussion about which graph features are most important for the disambiguation task. In addition, a new dataset () is created to allow a clean and scalable evaluation of NED with entries, and to be used as a reference in future research. In the end our results show that a Bi-LSTM encoding of the graph triplets performs best, improving upon the baseline models and scoring an F1 value of 91.6% on the test set
AutoMLBench: A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation of Automated Machine Learning Frameworks
With the booming demand for machine learning applications, it has been recognized that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale with the growing data volumes and application needs in our digital world. In response to this demand, several automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks have been developed to fill the gap of human expertise by automating the process of building machine learning pipelines. Each framework comes with different heuristics-based design decisions. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of the performance characteristics of six popular AutoML frameworks, namely, AutoWeka, AutoSKlearn, TPOT, Recipe, ATM, and SmartML, across 100 data sets from established AutoML benchmark suites. Our experimental evaluation considers different aspects for its comparison, including the performance impact of several design decisions, including time budget, size of search space, meta-learning, and ensemble construction. The results of our study reveal various interesting insights that can significantly guide and impact the design of AutoML frameworks.
AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data
Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the accuracy of modern image classifiers. However, current data augmentation implementations are manually designed. In this paper, we describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to automatically search for improved data augmentation policies. In our implementation, we have designed a search space where a policy consists of many sub-policies, one of which is randomly chosen for each image in each mini-batch. A sub-policy consists of two operations, each operation being an image processing function such as translation, rotation, or shearing, and the probabilities and magnitudes with which the functions are applied. We use a search algorithm to find the best policy such that the neural network yields the highest validation accuracy on a target dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet (without additional data). On ImageNet, we attain a Top-1 accuracy of 83.5% which is 0.4% better than the previous record of 83.1%. On CIFAR-10, we achieve an error rate of 1.5%, which is 0.6% better than the previous state-of-the-art. Augmentation policies we find are transferable between datasets. The policy learned on ImageNet transfers well to achieve significant improvements on other datasets, such as Oxford Flowers, Caltech-101, Oxford-IIT Pets, FGVC Aircraft, and Stanford Cars.
Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval
While image retrieval and instance recognition techniques are progressing rapidly, there is a need for challenging datasets to accurately measure their performance -- while posing novel challenges that are relevant for practical applications. We introduce the Google Landmarks Dataset v2 (GLDv2), a new benchmark for large-scale, fine-grained instance recognition and image retrieval in the domain of human-made and natural landmarks. GLDv2 is the largest such dataset to date by a large margin, including over 5M images and 200k distinct instance labels. Its test set consists of 118k images with ground truth annotations for both the retrieval and recognition tasks. The ground truth construction involved over 800 hours of human annotator work. Our new dataset has several challenging properties inspired by real world applications that previous datasets did not consider: An extremely long-tailed class distribution, a large fraction of out-of-domain test photos and large intra-class variability. The dataset is sourced from Wikimedia Commons, the world's largest crowdsourced collection of landmark photos. We provide baseline results for both recognition and retrieval tasks based on state-of-the-art methods as well as competitive results from a public challenge. We further demonstrate the suitability of the dataset for transfer learning by showing that image embeddings trained on it achieve competitive retrieval performance on independent datasets. The dataset images, ground-truth and metric scoring code are available at https://github.com/cvdfoundation/google-landmark.
A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of the parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). However, investigations of how LMs utilise retrieved information of varying complexity in real-world scenarios have been limited to synthetic contexts. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complex and diverse real-world context settings. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.
XLand-100B: A Large-Scale Multi-Task Dataset for In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Following the success of the in-context learning paradigm in large-scale language and computer vision models, the recently emerging field of in-context reinforcement learning is experiencing a rapid growth. However, its development has been held back by the lack of challenging benchmarks, as all the experiments have been carried out in simple environments and on small-scale datasets. We present XLand-100B, a large-scale dataset for in-context reinforcement learning based on the XLand-MiniGrid environment, as a first step to alleviate this problem. It contains complete learning histories for nearly 30,000 different tasks, covering 100B transitions and 2.5B episodes. It took 50,000 GPU hours to collect the dataset, which is beyond the reach of most academic labs. Along with the dataset, we provide the utilities to reproduce or expand it even further. With this substantial effort, we aim to democratize research in the rapidly growing field of in-context reinforcement learning and provide a solid foundation for further scaling. The code is open-source and available under Apache 2.0 licence at https://github.com/dunno-lab/xland-minigrid-datasets.
MotorFactory: A Blender Add-on for Large Dataset Generation of Small Electric Motors
To enable automatic disassembly of different product types with uncertain conditions and degrees of wear in remanufacturing, agile production systems that can adapt dynamically to changing requirements are needed. Machine learning algorithms can be employed due to their generalization capabilities of learning from various types and variants of products. However, in reality, datasets with a diversity of samples that can be used to train models are difficult to obtain in the initial period. This may cause bad performances when the system tries to adapt to new unseen input data in the future. In order to generate large datasets for different learning purposes, in our project, we present a Blender add-on named MotorFactory to generate customized mesh models of various motor instances. MotorFactory allows to create mesh models which, complemented with additional add-ons, can be further used to create synthetic RGB images, depth images, normal images, segmentation ground truth masks, and 3D point cloud datasets with point-wise semantic labels. The created synthetic datasets may be used for various tasks including motor type classification, object detection for decentralized material transfer tasks, part segmentation for disassembly and handling tasks, or even reinforcement learning-based robotics control or view-planning.
VegaEdge: Edge AI Confluence Anomaly Detection for Real-Time Highway IoT-Applications
Vehicle anomaly detection plays a vital role in highway safety applications such as accident prevention, rapid response, traffic flow optimization, and work zone safety. With the surge of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, there has arisen a pressing demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) based anomaly detection methods designed to meet the requirements of IoT devices. Catering to this futuristic vision, we introduce a lightweight approach to vehicle anomaly detection by utilizing the power of trajectory prediction. Our proposed design identifies vehicles deviating from expected paths, indicating highway risks from different camera-viewing angles from real-world highway datasets. On top of that, we present VegaEdge - a sophisticated AI confluence designed for real-time security and surveillance applications in modern highway settings through edge-centric IoT-embedded platforms equipped with our anomaly detection approach. Extensive testing across multiple platforms and traffic scenarios showcases the versatility and effectiveness of VegaEdge. This work also presents the Carolinas Anomaly Dataset (CAD), to bridge the existing gap in datasets tailored for highway anomalies. In real-world scenarios, our anomaly detection approach achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.94, and our proposed VegaEdge design, on an embedded IoT platform, processes 738 trajectories per second in a typical highway setting. The dataset is available at https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/Carolinas_Dataset#chd-anomaly-test-set .
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code
Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.
DATED: Guidelines for Creating Synthetic Datasets for Engineering Design Applications
Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .
Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning
Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the finetuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to instructions. Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) requires specifically constructed and annotated datasets. However, existing datasets are almost all in the English language. In this work, our primary goal is to bridge the language gap by building a human-curated instruction-following dataset spanning 65 languages. We worked with fluent speakers of languages from around the world to collect natural instances of instructions and completions. Furthermore, we create the most extensive multilingual collection to date, comprising 513 million instances through templating and translating existing datasets across 114 languages. In total, we contribute four key resources: we develop and open-source the Aya Annotation Platform, the Aya Dataset, the Aya Collection, and the Aya Evaluation Suite. The Aya initiative also serves as a valuable case study in participatory research, involving collaborators from 119 countries. We see this as a valuable framework for future research collaborations that aim to bridge gaps in resources.
AutoML-GPT: Large Language Model for AutoML
With the emerging trend of GPT models, we have established a framework called AutoML-GPT that integrates a comprehensive set of tools and libraries. This framework grants users access to a wide range of data preprocessing techniques, feature engineering methods, and model selection algorithms. Through a conversational interface, users can specify their requirements, constraints, and evaluation metrics. Throughout the process, AutoML-GPT employs advanced techniques for hyperparameter optimization and model selection, ensuring that the resulting model achieves optimal performance. The system effectively manages the complexity of the machine learning pipeline, guiding users towards the best choices without requiring deep domain knowledge. Through our experimental results on diverse datasets, we have demonstrated that AutoML-GPT significantly reduces the time and effort required for machine learning tasks. Its ability to leverage the vast knowledge encoded in large language models enables it to provide valuable insights, identify potential pitfalls, and suggest effective solutions to common challenges faced during model training.
PlayMyData: a curated dataset of multi-platform video games
Being predominant in digital entertainment for decades, video games have been recognized as valuable software artifacts by the software engineering (SE) community just recently. Such an acknowledgment has unveiled several research opportunities, spanning from empirical studies to the application of AI techniques for classification tasks. In this respect, several curated game datasets have been disclosed for research purposes even though the collected data are insufficient to support the application of advanced models or to enable interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the majority of those are limited to PC games, thus excluding notorious gaming platforms, e.g., PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. In this paper, we propose PlayMyData, a curated dataset composed of 99,864 multi-platform games gathered by IGDB website. By exploiting a dedicated API, we collect relevant metadata for each game, e.g., description, genre, rating, gameplay video URLs, and screenshots. Furthermore, we enrich PlayMyData with the timing needed to complete each game by mining the HLTB website. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive dataset in the domain that can be used to support different automated tasks in SE. More importantly, PlayMyData can be used to foster cross-domain investigations built on top of the provided multimedia data.
Roboflow 100: A Rich, Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark
The evaluation of object detection models is usually performed by optimizing a single metric, e.g. mAP, on a fixed set of datasets, e.g. Microsoft COCO and Pascal VOC. Due to image retrieval and annotation costs, these datasets consist largely of images found on the web and do not represent many real-life domains that are being modelled in practice, e.g. satellite, microscopic and gaming, making it difficult to assert the degree of generalization learned by the model. We introduce the Roboflow-100 (RF100) consisting of 100 datasets, 7 imagery domains, 224,714 images, and 805 class labels with over 11,170 labelling hours. We derived RF100 from over 90,000 public datasets, 60 million public images that are actively being assembled and labelled by computer vision practitioners in the open on the web application Roboflow Universe. By releasing RF100, we aim to provide a semantically diverse, multi-domain benchmark of datasets to help researchers test their model's generalizability with real-life data. RF100 download and benchmark replication are available on GitHub.
GenAI Arena: An Open Evaluation Platform for Generative Models
Generative AI has made remarkable strides to revolutionize fields such as image and video generation. These advancements are driven by innovative algorithms, architecture, and data. However, the rapid proliferation of generative models has highlighted a critical gap: the absence of trustworthy evaluation metrics. Current automatic assessments such as FID, CLIP, FVD, etc often fail to capture the nuanced quality and user satisfaction associated with generative outputs. This paper proposes an open platform GenAI-Arena to evaluate different image and video generative models, where users can actively participate in evaluating these models. By leveraging collective user feedback and votes, GenAI-Arena aims to provide a more democratic and accurate measure of model performance. It covers three arenas for text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and image editing respectively. Currently, we cover a total of 27 open-source generative models. GenAI-Arena has been operating for four months, amassing over 6000 votes from the community. We describe our platform, analyze the data, and explain the statistical methods for ranking the models. To further promote the research in building model-based evaluation metrics, we release a cleaned version of our preference data for the three tasks, namely GenAI-Bench. We prompt the existing multi-modal models like Gemini, GPT-4o to mimic human voting. We compute the correlation between model voting with human voting to understand their judging abilities. Our results show existing multimodal models are still lagging in assessing the generated visual content, even the best model GPT-4o only achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.22 in the quality subscore, and behaves like random guessing in others.
Alice Benchmarks: Connecting Real World Re-Identification with the Synthetic
For object re-identification (re-ID), learning from synthetic data has become a promising strategy to cheaply acquire large-scale annotated datasets and effective models, with few privacy concerns. Many interesting research problems arise from this strategy, e.g., how to reduce the domain gap between synthetic source and real-world target. To facilitate developing more new approaches in learning from synthetic data, we introduce the Alice benchmarks, large-scale datasets providing benchmarks as well as evaluation protocols to the research community. Within the Alice benchmarks, two object re-ID tasks are offered: person and vehicle re-ID. We collected and annotated two challenging real-world target datasets: AlicePerson and AliceVehicle, captured under various illuminations, image resolutions, etc. As an important feature of our real target, the clusterability of its training set is not manually guaranteed to make it closer to a real domain adaptation test scenario. Correspondingly, we reuse existing PersonX and VehicleX as synthetic source domains. The primary goal is to train models from synthetic data that can work effectively in the real world. In this paper, we detail the settings of Alice benchmarks, provide an analysis of existing commonly-used domain adaptation methods, and discuss some interesting future directions. An online server has been set up for the community to evaluate methods conveniently and fairly. Datasets and the online server details are available at https://sites.google.com/view/alice-benchmarks.
Fast and Accurate Zero-Training Classification for Tabular Engineering Data
In engineering design, navigating complex decision-making landscapes demands a thorough exploration of the design, performance, and constraint spaces, often impeded by resource-intensive simulations. Data-driven methods can mitigate this challenge by harnessing historical data to delineate feasible domains, accelerate optimization, or evaluate designs. However, the implementation of these methods usually demands machine-learning expertise and multiple trials to choose the right method and hyperparameters. This makes them less accessible for numerous engineering situations. Additionally, there is an inherent trade-off between training speed and accuracy, with faster methods sometimes compromising precision. In our paper, we demonstrate that a recently released general-purpose transformer-based classification model, TabPFN, is both fast and accurate. Notably, it requires no dataset-specific training to assess new tabular data. TabPFN is a Prior-Data Fitted Network, which undergoes a one-time offline training across a broad spectrum of synthetic datasets and performs in-context learning. We evaluated TabPFN's efficacy across eight engineering design classification problems, contrasting it with seven other algorithms, including a state-of-the-art AutoML method. For these classification challenges, TabPFN consistently outperforms in speed and accuracy. It is also the most data-efficient and provides the added advantage of being differentiable and giving uncertainty estimates. Our findings advocate for the potential of pre-trained models that learn from synthetic data and require no domain-specific tuning to make data-driven engineering design accessible to a broader community and open ways to efficient general-purpose models valid across applications. Furthermore, we share a benchmark problem set for evaluating new classification algorithms in engineering design.
Energy-based Automated Model Evaluation
The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real world applications. The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal prediction pipeline of the testing performance without the presence of ground-truth labels. Despite its recent successes, the AutoEval frameworks still suffer from an overconfidence issue, substantial storage and computational cost. In that regard, we propose a novel measure -- Meta-Distribution Energy (MDE) -- that allows the AutoEval framework to be both more efficient and effective. The core of the MDE is to establish a meta-distribution statistic, on the information (energy) associated with individual samples, then offer a smoother representation enabled by energy-based learning. We further provide our theoretical insights by connecting the MDE with the classification loss. We provide extensive experiments across modalities, datasets and different architectural backbones to validate MDE's validity, together with its superiority compared with prior approaches. We also prove MDE's versatility by showing its seamless integration with large-scale models, and easy adaption to learning scenarios with noisy- or imbalanced- labels. Code and data are available: https://github.com/pengr/Energy_AutoEval
Distraction is All You Need for Fairness
Bias in training datasets must be managed for various groups in classification tasks to ensure parity or equal treatment. With the recent growth in artificial intelligence models and their expanding role in automated decision-making, ensuring that these models are not biased is vital. There is an abundance of evidence suggesting that these models could contain or even amplify the bias present in the data on which they are trained, inherent to their objective function and learning algorithms; Many researchers direct their attention to this issue in different directions, namely, changing data to be statistically independent, adversarial training for restricting the capabilities of a particular competitor who aims to maximize parity, etc. These methods result in information loss and do not provide a suitable balance between accuracy and fairness or do not ensure limiting the biases in training. To this end, we propose a powerful strategy for training deep learning models called the Distraction module, which can be theoretically proven effective in controlling bias from affecting the classification results. This method can be utilized with different data types (e.g., Tabular, images, graphs, etc.). We demonstrate the potency of the proposed method by testing it on UCI Adult and Heritage Health datasets (tabular), POKEC-Z, POKEC-N and NBA datasets (graph), and CelebA dataset (vision). Using state-of-the-art methods proposed in the fairness literature for each dataset, we exhibit our model is superior to these proposed methods in minimizing bias and maintaining accuracy.
OpenSatMap: A Fine-grained High-resolution Satellite Dataset for Large-scale Map Construction
In this paper, we propose OpenSatMap, a fine-grained, high-resolution satellite dataset for large-scale map construction. Map construction is one of the foundations of the transportation industry, such as navigation and autonomous driving. Extracting road structures from satellite images is an efficient way to construct large-scale maps. However, existing satellite datasets provide only coarse semantic-level labels with a relatively low resolution (up to level 19), impeding the advancement of this field. In contrast, the proposed OpenSatMap (1) has fine-grained instance-level annotations; (2) consists of high-resolution images (level 20); (3) is currently the largest one of its kind; (4) collects data with high diversity. Moreover, OpenSatMap covers and aligns with the popular nuScenes dataset and Argoverse 2 dataset to potentially advance autonomous driving technologies. By publishing and maintaining the dataset, we provide a high-quality benchmark for satellite-based map construction and downstream tasks like autonomous driving.
HaGRID - HAnd Gesture Recognition Image Dataset
In this paper, we introduce an enormous dataset HaGRID (HAnd Gesture Recognition Image Dataset) for hand gesture recognition (HGR) systems. This dataset contains 552,992 samples divided into 18 classes of gestures. The annotations consist of bounding boxes of hands with gesture labels and markups of leading hands. The proposed dataset allows for building HGR systems, which can be used in video conferencing services, home automation systems, the automotive sector, services for people with speech and hearing impairments, etc. We are especially focused on interaction with devices to manage them. That is why all 18 chosen gestures are functional, familiar to the majority of people, and may be an incentive to take some action. In addition, we used crowdsourcing platforms to collect the dataset and took into account various parameters to ensure data diversity. We describe the challenges of using existing HGR datasets for our task and provide a detailed overview of them. Furthermore, the baselines for the hand detection and gesture classification tasks are proposed.
AutoRAG-HP: Automatic Online Hyper-Parameter Tuning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Recent advancements in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development, necessitating a reevaluation of AutoML principles for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. To address the challenges of hyper-parameter optimization and online adaptation in RAG, we propose the AutoRAG-HP framework, which formulates the hyper-parameter tuning as an online multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and introduces a novel two-level Hierarchical MAB (Hier-MAB) method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning hyper-parameters, such as top-k retrieved documents, prompt compression ratio, and embedding methods, using the ALCE-ASQA and Natural Questions datasets. Our evaluation from jointly optimization all three hyper-parameters demonstrate that MAB-based online learning methods can achieve Recall@5 approx 0.8 for scenarios with prominent gradients in search space, using only sim20% of the LLM API calls required by the Grid Search approach. Additionally, the proposed Hier-MAB approach outperforms other baselines in more challenging optimization scenarios. The code will be made available at https://aka.ms/autorag.
Is your benchmark truly adversarial? AdvScore: Evaluating Human-Grounded Adversarialness
Adversarial datasets should validate AI robustness by providing samples on which humans perform well, but models do not. However, as models evolve, datasets can become obsolete. Measuring whether a dataset remains adversarial is hindered by the lack of a standardized metric for measuring adversarialness. We propose AdvScore, a human-grounded evaluation metric that assesses a dataset's adversarialness by capturing models' and humans' varying abilities while also identifying poor examples. We then use AdvScore to motivate a new dataset creation pipeline for realistic and high-quality adversarial samples, enabling us to collect an adversarial question answering (QA) dataset, AdvQA. We apply AdvScore using 9,347 human responses and ten language models' predictions to track model improvement over five years, from 2020 to 2024. AdvScore thus provides guidance for achieving robustness comparable with human capabilities. Furthermore, it helps determine to what extent adversarial datasets continue to pose challenges, ensuring that, rather than reflecting outdated or overly artificial difficulties, they effectively test model capabilities.
What Does This Acronym Mean? Introducing a New Dataset for Acronym Identification and Disambiguation
Acronyms are the short forms of phrases that facilitate conveying lengthy sentences in documents and serve as one of the mainstays of writing. Due to their importance, identifying acronyms and corresponding phrases (i.e., acronym identification (AI)) and finding the correct meaning of each acronym (i.e., acronym disambiguation (AD)) are crucial for text understanding. Despite the recent progress on this task, there are some limitations in the existing datasets which hinder further improvement. More specifically, limited size of manually annotated AI datasets or noises in the automatically created acronym identification datasets obstruct designing advanced high-performing acronym identification models. Moreover, the existing datasets are mostly limited to the medical domain and ignore other domains. In order to address these two limitations, we first create a manually annotated large AI dataset for scientific domain. This dataset contains 17,506 sentences which is substantially larger than previous scientific AI datasets. Next, we prepare an AD dataset for scientific domain with 62,441 samples which is significantly larger than the previous scientific AD dataset. Our experiments show that the existing state-of-the-art models fall far behind human-level performance on both datasets proposed by this work. In addition, we propose a new deep learning model that utilizes the syntactical structure of the sentence to expand an ambiguous acronym in a sentence. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the new AD dataset, providing a strong baseline for future research on this dataset.
A crowdsourced dataset of aerial images with annotated solar photovoltaic arrays and installation metadata
Photovoltaic (PV) energy generation plays a crucial role in the energy transition. Small-scale PV installations are deployed at an unprecedented pace, and their integration into the grid can be challenging since public authorities often lack quality data about them. Overhead imagery is increasingly used to improve the knowledge of residential PV installations with machine learning models capable of automatically mapping these installations. However, these models cannot be easily transferred from one region or data source to another due to differences in image acquisition. To address this issue known as domain shift and foster the development of PV array mapping pipelines, we propose a dataset containing aerial images, annotations, and segmentation masks. We provide installation metadata for more than 28,000 installations. We provide ground truth segmentation masks for 13,000 installations, including 7,000 with annotations for two different image providers. Finally, we provide installation metadata that matches the annotation for more than 8,000 installations. Dataset applications include end-to-end PV registry construction, robust PV installations mapping, and analysis of crowdsourced datasets.
K-Sort Arena: Efficient and Reliable Benchmarking for Generative Models via K-wise Human Preferences
The rapid advancement of visual generative models necessitates efficient and reliable evaluation methods. Arena platform, which gathers user votes on model comparisons, can rank models with human preferences. However, traditional Arena methods, while established, require an excessive number of comparisons for ranking to converge and are vulnerable to preference noise in voting, suggesting the need for better approaches tailored to contemporary evaluation challenges. In this paper, we introduce K-Sort Arena, an efficient and reliable platform based on a key insight: images and videos possess higher perceptual intuitiveness than texts, enabling rapid evaluation of multiple samples simultaneously. Consequently, K-Sort Arena employs K-wise comparisons, allowing K models to engage in free-for-all competitions, which yield much richer information than pairwise comparisons. To enhance the robustness of the system, we leverage probabilistic modeling and Bayesian updating techniques. We propose an exploration-exploitation-based matchmaking strategy to facilitate more informative comparisons. In our experiments, K-Sort Arena exhibits 16.3x faster convergence compared to the widely used ELO algorithm. To further validate the superiority and obtain a comprehensive leaderboard, we collect human feedback via crowdsourced evaluations of numerous cutting-edge text-to-image and text-to-video models. Thanks to its high efficiency, K-Sort Arena can continuously incorporate emerging models and update the leaderboard with minimal votes. Our project has undergone several months of internal testing and is now available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ksort/K-Sort-Arena
Learning from the Worst: Dynamically Generated Datasets to Improve Online Hate Detection
We present a human-and-model-in-the-loop process for dynamically generating datasets and training better performing and more robust hate detection models. We provide a new dataset of ~40,000 entries, generated and labelled by trained annotators over four rounds of dynamic data creation. It includes ~15,000 challenging perturbations and each hateful entry has fine-grained labels for the type and target of hate. Hateful entries make up 54% of the dataset, which is substantially higher than comparable datasets. We show that model performance is substantially improved using this approach. Models trained on later rounds of data collection perform better on test sets and are harder for annotators to trick. They also perform better on HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for online hate detection. We provide the code, dataset and annotation guidelines for other researchers to use. Accepted at ACL 2021.
Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation
Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data and can often be obtained from distributions beyond the source distribution as well. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks with unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). The update maintains consistency with the original WILDS benchmark by using identical labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics. On these datasets, we systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.
OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents
Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified. We introduce the OBELICS dataset, an open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents comprising 141 million web pages extracted from Common Crawl, 353 million associated images, and 115 billion text tokens. We describe the dataset creation process, present comprehensive filtering rules, and provide an analysis of the dataset's content. To show the viability of OBELICS, we train vision and language models of 9 and 80 billion parameters named IDEFICS, and obtain competitive performance on different multimodal benchmarks. We release our dataset, models and code.
Multiagent Multitraversal Multimodal Self-Driving: Open MARS Dataset
Large-scale datasets have fueled recent advancements in AI-based autonomous vehicle research. However, these datasets are usually collected from a single vehicle's one-time pass of a certain location, lacking multiagent interactions or repeated traversals of the same place. Such information could lead to transformative enhancements in autonomous vehicles' perception, prediction, and planning capabilities. To bridge this gap, in collaboration with the self-driving company May Mobility, we present the MARS dataset which unifies scenarios that enable MultiAgent, multitraveRSal, and multimodal autonomous vehicle research. More specifically, MARS is collected with a fleet of autonomous vehicles driving within a certain geographical area. Each vehicle has its own route and different vehicles may appear at nearby locations. Each vehicle is equipped with a LiDAR and surround-view RGB cameras. We curate two subsets in MARS: one facilitates collaborative driving with multiple vehicles simultaneously present at the same location, and the other enables memory retrospection through asynchronous traversals of the same location by multiple vehicles. We conduct experiments in place recognition and neural reconstruction. More importantly, MARS introduces new research opportunities and challenges such as multitraversal 3D reconstruction, multiagent perception, and unsupervised object discovery. Our data and codes can be found at https://ai4ce.github.io/MARS/.
DeepSportradar-v1: Computer Vision Dataset for Sports Understanding with High Quality Annotations
With the recent development of Deep Learning applied to Computer Vision, sport video understanding has gained a lot of attention, providing much richer information for both sport consumers and leagues. This paper introduces DeepSportradar-v1, a suite of computer vision tasks, datasets and benchmarks for automated sport understanding. The main purpose of this framework is to close the gap between academic research and real world settings. To this end, the datasets provide high-resolution raw images, camera parameters and high quality annotations. DeepSportradar currently supports four challenging tasks related to basketball: ball 3D localization, camera calibration, player instance segmentation and player re-identification. For each of the four tasks, a detailed description of the dataset, objective, performance metrics, and the proposed baseline method are provided. To encourage further research on advanced methods for sport understanding, a competition is organized as part of the MMSports workshop from the ACM Multimedia 2022 conference, where participants have to develop state-of-the-art methods to solve the above tasks. The four datasets, development kits and baselines are publicly available.
AutoChart: A Dataset for Chart-to-Text Generation Task
The analytical description of charts is an exciting and important research area with many applications in academia and industry. Yet, this challenging task has received limited attention from the computational linguistics research community. This paper proposes AutoChart, a large dataset for the analytical description of charts, which aims to encourage more research into this important area. Specifically, we offer a novel framework that generates the charts and their analytical description automatically. We conducted extensive human and machine evaluations on the generated charts and descriptions and demonstrate that the generated texts are informative, coherent, and relevant to the corresponding charts.
Think you have Solved Direct-Answer Question Answering? Try ARC-DA, the Direct-Answer AI2 Reasoning Challenge
We present the ARC-DA dataset, a direct-answer ("open response", "freeform") version of the ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) multiple-choice dataset. While ARC has been influential in the community, its multiple-choice format is unrepresentative of real-world questions, and multiple choice formats can be particularly susceptible to artifacts. The ARC-DA dataset addresses these concerns by converting questions to direct-answer format using a combination of crowdsourcing and expert review. The resulting dataset contains 2985 questions with a total of 8436 valid answers (questions typically have more than one valid answer). ARC-DA is one of the first DA datasets of natural questions that often require reasoning, and where appropriate question decompositions are not evident from the questions themselves. We describe the conversion approach taken, appropriate evaluation metrics, and several strong models. Although high, the best scores (81% GENIE, 61.4% F1, 63.2% ROUGE-L) still leave considerable room for improvement. In addition, the dataset provides a natural setting for new research on explanation, as many questions require reasoning to construct answers. We hope the dataset spurs further advances in complex question-answering by the community. ARC-DA is available at https://allenai.org/data/arc-da
ParisLuco3D: A high-quality target dataset for domain generalization of LiDAR perception
LiDAR is a sensor system that supports autonomous driving by gathering precise geometric information about the scene. Exploiting this information for perception is interesting as the amount of available data increases. As the quantitative performance of various perception tasks has improved, the focus has shifted from source-to-source perception to domain adaptation and domain generalization for perception. These new goals require access to a large variety of domains for evaluation. Unfortunately, the various annotation strategies of data providers complicate the computation of cross-domain performance based on the available data This paper provides a novel dataset, specifically designed for cross-domain evaluation to make it easier to evaluate the performance of various source datasets. Alongside the dataset, a flexible online benchmark is provided to ensure a fair comparison across methods.
DeFine: A Decomposed and Fine-Grained Annotated Dataset for Long-form Article Generation
Long-form article generation (LFAG) presents challenges such as maintaining logical consistency, comprehensive topic coverage, and narrative coherence across extended articles. Existing datasets often lack both the hierarchical structure and fine-grained annotation needed to effectively decompose tasks, resulting in shallow, disorganized article generation. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFine, a Decomposed and Fine-grained annotated dataset for long-form article generation. DeFine is characterized by its hierarchical decomposition strategy and the integration of domain-specific knowledge with multi-level annotations, ensuring granular control and enhanced depth in article generation. To construct the dataset, a multi-agent collaborative pipeline is proposed, which systematically segments the generation process into four parts: Data Miner, Cite Retreiver, Q&A Annotator and Data Cleaner. To validate the effectiveness of DeFine, we designed and tested three LFAG baselines: the web retrieval, the local retrieval, and the grounded reference. We fine-tuned the Qwen2-7b-Instruct model using the DeFine training dataset. The experimental results showed significant improvements in text quality, specifically in topic coverage, depth of information, and content fidelity. Our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research.
Haystack: A Panoptic Scene Graph Dataset to Evaluate Rare Predicate Classes
Current scene graph datasets suffer from strong long-tail distributions of their predicate classes. Due to a very low number of some predicate classes in the test sets, no reliable metrics can be retrieved for the rarest classes. We construct a new panoptic scene graph dataset and a set of metrics that are designed as a benchmark for the predictive performance especially on rare predicate classes. To construct the new dataset, we propose a model-assisted annotation pipeline that efficiently finds rare predicate classes that are hidden in a large set of images like needles in a haystack. Contrary to prior scene graph datasets, Haystack contains explicit negative annotations, i.e. annotations that a given relation does not have a certain predicate class. Negative annotations are helpful especially in the field of scene graph generation and open up a whole new set of possibilities to improve current scene graph generation models. Haystack is 100% compatible with existing panoptic scene graph datasets and can easily be integrated with existing evaluation pipelines. Our dataset and code can be found here: https://lorjul.github.io/haystack/. It includes annotation files and simple to use scripts and utilities, to help with integrating our dataset in existing work.
Automated Machine Learning on Graphs: A Survey
Machine learning on graphs has been extensively studied in both academic and industry. However, as the literature on graph learning booms with a vast number of emerging methods and techniques, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually design the optimal machine learning algorithm for different graph-related tasks. To solve this critical challenge, automated machine learning (AutoML) on graphs which combines the strength of graph machine learning and AutoML together, is gaining attention from the research community. Therefore, we comprehensively survey AutoML on graphs in this paper, primarily focusing on hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) and neural architecture search (NAS) for graph machine learning. We further overview libraries related to automated graph machine learning and in-depth discuss AutoGL, the first dedicated open-source library for AutoML on graphs. In the end, we share our insights on future research directions for automated graph machine learning. This paper is the first systematic and comprehensive review of automated machine learning on graphs to the best of our knowledge.
ULTra-AV: A Unified Longitudinal Trajectory Dataset for Automated Vehicle
Automated Vehicles (AVs) promise significant advances in transportation. Critical to these improvements is understanding AVs' longitudinal behavior, relying heavily on real-world trajectory data. Existing open-source trajectory datasets of AV, however, often fall short in refinement, reliability, and completeness, hindering effective performance metrics analysis and model development. This study addresses these challenges by creating a Unified Longitudinal TRAjectory dataset for AVs (Ultra-AV) to analyze their microscopic longitudinal driving behaviors. This dataset compiles data from 13 distinct sources, encompassing various AV types, test sites, and experiment scenarios. We established a three-step data processing: 1. extraction of longitudinal trajectory data, 2. general data cleaning, and 3. data-specific cleaning to obtain the longitudinal trajectory data and car-following trajectory data. The validity of the processed data is affirmed through performance evaluations across safety, mobility, stability, and sustainability, along with an analysis of the relationships between variables in car-following models. Our work not only furnishes researchers with standardized data and metrics for longitudinal AV behavior studies but also sets guidelines for data collection and model development.
Revisiting Oxford and Paris: Large-Scale Image Retrieval Benchmarking
In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.
Building a Family of Data Augmentation Models for Low-cost LLM Fine-tuning on the Cloud
Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.
MineRL: A Large-Scale Dataset of Minecraft Demonstrations
The sample inefficiency of standard deep reinforcement learning methods precludes their application to many real-world problems. Methods which leverage human demonstrations require fewer samples but have been researched less. As demonstrated in the computer vision and natural language processing communities, large-scale datasets have the capacity to facilitate research by serving as an experimental and benchmarking platform for new methods. However, existing datasets compatible with reinforcement learning simulators do not have sufficient scale, structure, and quality to enable the further development and evaluation of methods focused on using human examples. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive, large-scale, simulator-paired dataset of human demonstrations: MineRL. The dataset consists of over 60 million automatically annotated state-action pairs across a variety of related tasks in Minecraft, a dynamic, 3D, open-world environment. We present a novel data collection scheme which allows for the ongoing introduction of new tasks and the gathering of complete state information suitable for a variety of methods. We demonstrate the hierarchality, diversity, and scale of the MineRL dataset. Further, we show the difficulty of the Minecraft domain along with the potential of MineRL in developing techniques to solve key research challenges within it.
Zenseact Open Dataset: A large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset for autonomous driving
Existing datasets for autonomous driving (AD) often lack diversity and long-range capabilities, focusing instead on 360{\deg} perception and temporal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset collected over two years in various European countries, covering an area 9x that of existing datasets. ZOD boasts the highest range and resolution sensors among comparable datasets, coupled with detailed keyframe annotations for 2D and 3D objects (up to 245m), road instance/semantic segmentation, traffic sign recognition, and road classification. We believe that this unique combination will facilitate breakthroughs in long-range perception and multi-task learning. The dataset is composed of Frames, Sequences, and Drives, designed to encompass both data diversity and support for spatio-temporal learning, sensor fusion, localization, and mapping. Frames consist of 100k curated camera images with two seconds of other supporting sensor data, while the 1473 Sequences and 29 Drives include the entire sensor suite for 20 seconds and a few minutes, respectively. ZOD is the only large-scale AD dataset released under a permissive license, allowing for both research and commercial use. The dataset is accompanied by an extensive development kit. Data and more information are available online (https://zod.zenseact.com).
R2S100K: Road-Region Segmentation Dataset For Semi-Supervised Autonomous Driving in the Wild
Semantic understanding of roadways is a key enabling factor for safe autonomous driving. However, existing autonomous driving datasets provide well-structured urban roads while ignoring unstructured roadways containing distress, potholes, water puddles, and various kinds of road patches i.e., earthen, gravel etc. To this end, we introduce Road Region Segmentation dataset (R2S100K) -- a large-scale dataset and benchmark for training and evaluation of road segmentation in aforementioned challenging unstructured roadways. R2S100K comprises 100K images extracted from a large and diverse set of video sequences covering more than 1000 KM of roadways. Out of these 100K privacy respecting images, 14,000 images have fine pixel-labeling of road regions, with 86,000 unlabeled images that can be leveraged through semi-supervised learning methods. Alongside, we present an Efficient Data Sampling (EDS) based self-training framework to improve learning by leveraging unlabeled data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves learning methods in generalizability and reduces the labeling cost for semantic segmentation tasks. Our benchmark will be publicly available to facilitate future research at https://r2s100k.github.io/.
Striking Gold in Advertising: Standardization and Exploration of Ad Text Generation
In response to the limitations of manual ad creation, significant research has been conducted in the field of automatic ad text generation (ATG). However, the lack of comprehensive benchmarks and well-defined problem sets has made comparing different methods challenging. To tackle these challenges, we standardize the task of ATG and propose a first benchmark dataset, CAMERA, carefully designed and enabling the utilization of multi-modal information and facilitating industry-wise evaluations. Our extensive experiments with a variety of nine baselines, from classical methods to state-of-the-art models including large language models (LLMs), show the current state and the remaining challenges. We also explore how existing metrics in ATG and an LLM-based evaluator align with human evaluations.
MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset
We introduce MADLAD-400, a manually audited, general domain 3T token monolingual dataset based on CommonCrawl, spanning 419 languages. We discuss the limitations revealed by self-auditing MADLAD-400, and the role data auditing had in the dataset creation process. We then train and release a 10.7B-parameter multilingual machine translation model on 250 billion tokens covering over 450 languages using publicly available data, and find that it is competitive with models that are significantly larger, and report the results on different domains. In addition, we train a 8B-parameter language model, and assess the results on few-shot translation. We make the baseline models available to the research community.
TLD: A Vehicle Tail Light signal Dataset and Benchmark
Understanding other drivers' intentions is crucial for safe driving. The role of taillights in conveying these intentions is underemphasized in current autonomous driving systems. Accurately identifying taillight signals is essential for predicting vehicle behavior and preventing collisions. Open-source taillight datasets are scarce, often small and inconsistently annotated. To address this gap, we introduce a new large-scale taillight dataset called TLD. Sourced globally, our dataset covers diverse traffic scenarios. To our knowledge, TLD is the first dataset to separately annotate brake lights and turn signals in real driving scenarios. We collected 17.78 hours of driving videos from the internet. This dataset consists of 152k labeled image frames sampled at a rate of 2 Hz, along with 1.5 million unlabeled frames interspersed throughout. Additionally, we have developed a two-stage vehicle light detection model consisting of two primary modules: a vehicle detector and a taillight classifier. Initially, YOLOv10 and DeepSORT captured consecutive vehicle images over time. Subsequently, the two classifiers work simultaneously to determine the states of the brake lights and turn signals. A post-processing procedure is then used to eliminate noise caused by misidentifications and provide the taillight states of the vehicle within a given time frame. Our method shows exceptional performance on our dataset, establishing a benchmark for vehicle taillight detection. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ChaiJohn/TLD/tree/main
Machine Learning for Shipwreck Segmentation from Side Scan Sonar Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark
Open-source benchmark datasets have been a critical component for advancing machine learning for robot perception in terrestrial applications. Benchmark datasets enable the widespread development of state-of-the-art machine learning methods, which require large datasets for training, validation, and thorough comparison to competing approaches. Underwater environments impose several operational challenges that hinder efforts to collect large benchmark datasets for marine robot perception. Furthermore, a low abundance of targets of interest relative to the size of the search space leads to increased time and cost required to collect useful datasets for a specific task. As a result, there is limited availability of labeled benchmark datasets for underwater applications. We present the AI4Shipwrecks dataset, which consists of 24 distinct shipwreck sites totaling 286 high-resolution labeled side scan sonar images to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous sonar image understanding. We leverage the unique abundance of targets in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, MI, to collect and compile a sonar imagery benchmark dataset through surveys with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We consulted with expert marine archaeologists for the labeling of robotically gathered data. We then leverage this dataset to perform benchmark experiments for comparison of state-of-the-art supervised segmentation methods, and we present insights on opportunities and open challenges for the field. The dataset and benchmarking tools will be released as an open-source benchmark dataset to spur innovation in machine learning for Great Lakes and ocean exploration. The dataset and accompanying software are available at https://umfieldrobotics.github.io/ai4shipwrecks/.
Thinking Like an Annotator: Generation of Dataset Labeling Instructions
Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.
SELA: Tree-Search Enhanced LLM Agents for Automated Machine Learning
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) approaches encompass traditional methods that optimize fixed pipelines for model selection and ensembling, as well as newer LLM-based frameworks that autonomously build pipelines. While LLM-based agents have shown promise in automating machine learning tasks, they often generate low-diversity and suboptimal code, even after multiple iterations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tree-Search Enhanced LLM Agents (SELA), an innovative agent-based system that leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to optimize the AutoML process. By representing pipeline configurations as trees, our framework enables agents to conduct experiments intelligently and iteratively refine their strategies, facilitating a more effective exploration of the machine learning solution space. This novel approach allows SELA to discover optimal pathways based on experimental feedback, improving the overall quality of the solutions. In an extensive evaluation across 20 machine learning datasets, we compare the performance of traditional and agent-based AutoML methods, demonstrating that SELA achieves a win rate of 65% to 80% against each baseline across all datasets. These results underscore the significant potential of agent-based strategies in AutoML, offering a fresh perspective on tackling complex machine learning challenges.
PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search
We introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models. PaSa can autonomously make a series of decisions, including invoking search tools, reading papers, and selecting relevant references, to ultimately obtain comprehensive and accurate results for complex scholarly queries. We optimize PaSa using reinforcement learning with a synthetic dataset, AutoScholarQuery, which includes 35k fine-grained academic queries and corresponding papers sourced from top-tier AI conference publications. Additionally, we develop RealScholarQuery, a benchmark collecting real-world academic queries to assess PaSa performance in more realistic scenarios. Despite being trained on synthetic data, PaSa significantly outperforms existing baselines on RealScholarQuery, including Google, Google Scholar, Google with GPT-4 for paraphrased queries, chatGPT (search-enabled GPT-4o), GPT-o1, and PaSa-GPT-4o (PaSa implemented by prompting GPT-4o). Notably, PaSa-7B surpasses the best Google-based baseline, Google with GPT-4o, by 37.78% in recall@20 and 39.90% in recall@50. It also exceeds PaSa-GPT-4o by 30.36% in recall and 4.25% in precision. Model, datasets, and code are available at https://github.com/bytedance/pasa.
OnlySportsLM: Optimizing Sports-Domain Language Models with SOTA Performance under Billion Parameters
This paper explores the potential of a small, domain-specific language model trained exclusively on sports-related data. We investigate whether extensive training data with specially designed small model structures can overcome model size constraints. The study introduces the OnlySports collection, comprising OnlySportsLM, OnlySports Dataset, and OnlySports Benchmark. Our approach involves: 1) creating a massive 600 billion tokens OnlySports Dataset from FineWeb, 2) optimizing the RWKV architecture for sports-related tasks, resulting in a 196M parameters model with 20-layer, 640-dimension structure, 3) training the OnlySportsLM on part of OnlySports Dataset, and 4) testing the resultant model on OnlySports Benchmark. OnlySportsLM achieves a 37.62%/34.08% accuracy improvement over previous 135M/360M state-of-the-art models and matches the performance of larger models such as SomlLM 1.7B and Qwen 1.5B in the sports domain. Additionally, the OnlySports collection presents a comprehensive workflow for building high-quality, domain-specific language models, providing a replicable blueprint for efficient AI development across various specialized fields.
CPPE-5: Medical Personal Protective Equipment Dataset
We present a new challenging dataset, CPPE - 5 (Medical Personal Protective Equipment), with the goal to allow the study of subordinate categorization of medical personal protective equipments, which is not possible with other popular data sets that focus on broad-level categories (such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, OpenImages, etc). To make it easy for models trained on this dataset to be used in practical scenarios in complex scenes, our dataset mainly contains images that show complex scenes with several objects in each scene in their natural context. The image collection for this dataset focuses on: obtaining as many non-iconic images as possible and making sure all the images are real-life images, unlike other existing datasets in this area. Our dataset includes 5 object categories (coveralls, face shields, gloves, masks, and goggles), and each image is annotated with a set of bounding boxes and positive labels. We present a detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison to other popular broad category datasets as well as datasets focusing on personal protective equipments, we also find that at present there exist no such publicly available datasets. Finally, we also analyze performance and compare model complexities on baseline and state-of-the-art models for bounding box results. Our code, data, and trained models are available at https://git.io/cppe5-dataset.
ARLBench: Flexible and Efficient Benchmarking for Hyperparameter Optimization in Reinforcement Learning
Hyperparameters are a critical factor in reliably training well-performing reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Unfortunately, developing and evaluating automated approaches for tuning such hyperparameters is both costly and time-consuming. As a result, such approaches are often only evaluated on a single domain or algorithm, making comparisons difficult and limiting insights into their generalizability. We propose ARLBench, a benchmark for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in RL that allows comparisons of diverse HPO approaches while being highly efficient in evaluation. To enable research into HPO in RL, even in settings with low compute resources, we select a representative subset of HPO tasks spanning a variety of algorithm and environment combinations. This selection allows for generating a performance profile of an automated RL (AutoRL) method using only a fraction of the compute previously necessary, enabling a broader range of researchers to work on HPO in RL. With the extensive and large-scale dataset on hyperparameter landscapes that our selection is based on, ARLBench is an efficient, flexible, and future-oriented foundation for research on AutoRL. Both the benchmark and the dataset are available at https://github.com/automl/arlbench.
WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark
Face detection is one of the most studied topics in the computer vision community. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face detection benchmark datasets. We show that there is a gap between current face detection performance and the real world requirements. To facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face bounding boxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performance and propose a solution to deal with large scale variation. Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to be further investigated. Dataset can be downloaded at: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/WIDERFace
AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents
AI agents have drawn increasing attention mostly on their ability to perceive environments, understand tasks, and autonomously achieve goals. To advance research on AI agents in mobile scenarios, we introduce the Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX), a comprehensive, large-scale dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents. Their capabilities of completing complex tasks by directly interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) on mobile devices are trained and evaluated with the proposed dataset. AMEX comprises over 104K high-resolution screenshots from 110 popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels. Unlike existing mobile device-control datasets, e.g., MoTIF, AitW, etc., AMEX includes three levels of annotations: GUI interactive element grounding, GUI screen and element functionality descriptions, and complex natural language instructions, each averaging 13 steps with stepwise GUI-action chains. We develop this dataset from a more instructive and detailed perspective, complementing the general settings of existing datasets. Additionally, we develop a baseline model SPHINX Agent and compare its performance across state-of-the-art agents trained on other datasets. To facilitate further research, we open-source our dataset, models, and relevant evaluation tools. The project is available at https://yuxiangchai.github.io/AMEX/
Automatic Generation of Model and Data Cards: A Step Towards Responsible AI
In an era of model and data proliferation in machine learning/AI especially marked by the rapid advancement of open-sourced technologies, there arises a critical need for standardized consistent documentation. Our work addresses the information incompleteness in current human-generated model and data cards. We propose an automated generation approach using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our key contributions include the establishment of CardBench, a comprehensive dataset aggregated from over 4.8k model cards and 1.4k data cards, coupled with the development of the CardGen pipeline comprising a two-step retrieval process. Our approach exhibits enhanced completeness, objectivity, and faithfulness in generated model and data cards, a significant step in responsible AI documentation practices ensuring better accountability and traceability.
AIDOVECL: AI-generated Dataset of Outpainted Vehicles for Eye-level Classification and Localization
Image labeling is a critical bottleneck in the development of computer vision technologies, often constraining the potential of machine learning models due to the time-intensive nature of manual annotations. This work introduces a novel approach that leverages outpainting to address the problem of annotated data scarcity by generating artificial contexts and annotations, significantly reducing manual labeling efforts. We apply this technique to a particularly acute challenge in autonomous driving, urban planning, and environmental monitoring: the lack of diverse, eye-level vehicle images in desired classes. Our dataset comprises AI-generated vehicle images obtained by detecting and cropping vehicles from manually selected seed images, which are then outpainted onto larger canvases to simulate varied real-world conditions. The outpainted images include detailed annotations, providing high-quality ground truth data. Advanced outpainting techniques and image quality assessments ensure visual fidelity and contextual relevance. Augmentation with outpainted vehicles improves overall performance metrics by up to 8\% and enhances prediction of underrepresented classes by up to 20\%. This approach, exemplifying outpainting as a self-annotating paradigm, presents a solution that enhances dataset versatility across multiple domains of machine learning. The code and links to datasets used in this study are available for further research and replication at https://github.com/amir-kazemi/aidovecl.
R.I.P.: Better Models by Survival of the Fittest Prompts
Training data quality is one of the most important drivers of final model quality. In this work, we introduce a method for evaluating data integrity based on the assumption that low-quality input prompts result in high variance and low quality responses. This is achieved by measuring the rejected response quality and the reward gap between the chosen and rejected preference pair. Our method, Rejecting Instruction Preferences (RIP) can be used to filter prompts from existing training sets, or to make high quality synthetic datasets, yielding large performance gains across various benchmarks compared to unfiltered data. Using Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct, RIP improves AlpacaEval2 LC Win Rate by 9.4%, Arena-Hard by 8.7%, and WildBench by 9.9%. Using Llama 3.3-70B-Instruct, RIP improves Arena-Hard from 67.5 to 82.9, which is from 18th place to 6th overall in the leaderboard.
The Health Gym: Synthetic Health-Related Datasets for the Development of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
In recent years, the machine learning research community has benefited tremendously from the availability of openly accessible benchmark datasets. Clinical data are usually not openly available due to their highly confidential nature. This has hampered the development of reproducible and generalisable machine learning applications in health care. Here we introduce the Health Gym - a growing collection of highly realistic synthetic medical datasets that can be freely accessed to prototype, evaluate, and compare machine learning algorithms, with a specific focus on reinforcement learning. The three synthetic datasets described in this paper present patient cohorts with acute hypotension and sepsis in the intensive care unit, and people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) receiving antiretroviral therapy in ambulatory care. The datasets were created using a novel generative adversarial network (GAN). The distributions of variables, and correlations between variables and trends over time in the synthetic datasets mirror those in the real datasets. Furthermore, the risk of sensitive information disclosure associated with the public distribution of the synthetic datasets is estimated to be very low.
Auto-Differentiation of Relational Computations for Very Large Scale Machine Learning
The relational data model was designed to facilitate large-scale data management and analytics. We consider the problem of how to differentiate computations expressed relationally. We show experimentally that a relational engine running an auto-differentiated relational algorithm can easily scale to very large datasets, and is competitive with state-of-the-art, special-purpose systems for large-scale distributed machine learning.
DrivAerNet: A Parametric Car Dataset for Data-Driven Aerodynamic Design and Graph-Based Drag Prediction
This study introduces DrivAerNet, a large-scale high-fidelity CFD dataset of 3D industry-standard car shapes, and RegDGCNN, a dynamic graph convolutional neural network model, both aimed at aerodynamic car design through machine learning. DrivAerNet, with its 4000 detailed 3D car meshes using 0.5 million surface mesh faces and comprehensive aerodynamic performance data comprising of full 3D pressure, velocity fields, and wall-shear stresses, addresses the critical need for extensive datasets to train deep learning models in engineering applications. It is 60\% larger than the previously available largest public dataset of cars, and is the only open-source dataset that also models wheels and underbody. RegDGCNN leverages this large-scale dataset to provide high-precision drag estimates directly from 3D meshes, bypassing traditional limitations such as the need for 2D image rendering or Signed Distance Fields (SDF). By enabling fast drag estimation in seconds, RegDGCNN facilitates rapid aerodynamic assessments, offering a substantial leap towards integrating data-driven methods in automotive design. Together, DrivAerNet and RegDGCNN promise to accelerate the car design process and contribute to the development of more efficient vehicles. To lay the groundwork for future innovations in the field, the dataset and code used in our study are publicly accessible at https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/DrivAerNet
From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline
The rapid evolution of language models has necessitated the development of more challenging benchmarks. Current static benchmarks often struggle to consistently distinguish between the capabilities of different models and fail to align with real-world user preferences. On the other hand, live crowd-sourced platforms like the Chatbot Arena collect a wide range of natural prompts and user feedback. However, these prompts vary in sophistication and the feedback cannot be applied offline to new models. In order to ensure that benchmarks keep up with the pace of LLM development, we address how one can evaluate benchmarks on their ability to confidently separate models and their alignment with human preference. Under these principles, we developed BenchBuilder, a living benchmark that filters high-quality prompts from live data sources to enable offline evaluation on fresh, challenging prompts. BenchBuilder identifies seven indicators of a high-quality prompt, such as the requirement for domain knowledge, and utilizes an LLM annotator to select a high-quality subset of prompts from various topic clusters. The LLM evaluation process employs an LLM judge to ensure a fully automated, high-quality, and constantly updating benchmark. We apply BenchBuilder on prompts from the Chatbot Arena to create Arena-Hard-Auto v0.1: 500 challenging user prompts from a wide range of tasks. Arena-Hard-Auto v0.1 offers 3x tighter confidence intervals than MT-Bench and achieves a state-of-the-art 89.1% agreement with human preference rankings, all at a cost of only $25 and without human labelers. The BenchBuilder pipeline enhances evaluation benchmarks and provides a valuable tool for developers, enabling them to extract high-quality benchmarks from extensive data with minimal effort.
RoundTable: Leveraging Dynamic Schema and Contextual Autocomplete for Enhanced Query Precision in Tabular Question Answering
With advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), a major use case that has emerged is querying databases in plain English, translating user questions into executable database queries, which has improved significantly. However, real-world datasets often feature a vast array of attributes and complex values, complicating the LLMs task of accurately identifying relevant columns or values from natural language queries. Traditional methods cannot fully relay the datasets size and complexity to the LLM. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that leverages Full-Text Search (FTS) on the input table. This approach not only enables precise detection of specific values and columns but also narrows the search space for language models, thereby enhancing query accuracy. Additionally, it supports a custom auto-complete feature that suggests queries based on the data in the table. This integration significantly refines the interaction between the user and complex datasets, offering a sophisticated solution to the limitations faced by current table querying capabilities. This work is accompanied by an application for both Mac and Windows platforms, which readers can try out themselves on their own data.
LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models
Groundbreaking language-vision architectures like CLIP and DALL-E proved the utility of training on large amounts of noisy image-text data, without relying on expensive accurate labels used in standard vision unimodal supervised learning. The resulting models showed capabilities of strong text-guided image generation and transfer to downstream tasks, while performing remarkably at zero-shot classification with noteworthy out-of-distribution robustness. Since then, large-scale language-vision models like ALIGN, BASIC, GLIDE, Flamingo and Imagen made further improvements. Studying the training and capabilities of such models requires datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. Until now, no datasets of this size have been made openly available for the broader research community. To address this problem and democratize research on large-scale multi-modal models, we present LAION-5B - a dataset consisting of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, of which 2.32B contain English language. We show successful replication and fine-tuning of foundational models like CLIP, GLIDE and Stable Diffusion using the dataset, and discuss further experiments enabled with an openly available dataset of this scale. Additionally we provide several nearest neighbor indices, an improved web-interface for dataset exploration and subset generation, and detection scores for watermark, NSFW, and toxic content detection. Announcement page https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/
PEFT-U: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for User Personalization
The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heralded a new era of human-AI interaction. These sophisticated models, exemplified by Chat-GPT and its successors, have exhibited remarkable capabilities in language understanding. However, as these LLMs have undergone exponential growth, a crucial dimension that remains understudied is the personalization of these models. Large foundation models such as GPT-3 etc. focus on creating a universal model that serves a broad range of tasks and users. This approach emphasizes the model's generalization capabilities, treating users as a collective rather than as distinct individuals. While practical for many common applications, this one-size-fits-all approach often fails to address the rich tapestry of human diversity and individual needs. To explore this issue we introduce the PEFT-U Benchmark: a new dataset for building and evaluating NLP models for user personalization. consists of a series of user-centered tasks containing diverse and individualized expressions where the preferences of users can potentially differ for the same input. Using PEFT-U, we explore the challenge of efficiently personalizing LLMs to accommodate user-specific preferences in the context of diverse user-centered tasks.
WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts
Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.
Putting Data at the Centre of Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is an exciting direction of research that uses static datasets to find optimal control policies for multi-agent systems. Though the field is by definition data-driven, efforts have thus far neglected data in their drive to achieve state-of-the-art results. We first substantiate this claim by surveying the literature, showing how the majority of works generate their own datasets without consistent methodology and provide sparse information about the characteristics of these datasets. We then show why neglecting the nature of the data is problematic, through salient examples of how tightly algorithmic performance is coupled to the dataset used, necessitating a common foundation for experiments in the field. In response, we take a big step towards improving data usage and data awareness in offline MARL, with three key contributions: (1) a clear guideline for generating novel datasets; (2) a standardisation of over 80 existing datasets, hosted in a publicly available repository, using a consistent storage format and easy-to-use API; and (3) a suite of analysis tools that allow us to understand these datasets better, aiding further development.
TRR360D: A dataset for 360 degree rotated rectangular box table detection
To address the problem of scarcity and high annotation costs of rotated image table detection datasets, this paper proposes a method for building a rotated image table detection dataset. Based on the ICDAR2019MTD modern table detection dataset, we refer to the annotation format of the DOTA dataset to create the TRR360D rotated table detection dataset. The training set contains 600 rotated images and 977 annotated instances, and the test set contains 240 rotated images and 499 annotated instances. The AP50(T<90) evaluation metric is defined, and this dataset is available for future researchers to study rotated table detection algorithms and promote the development of table detection technology. The TRR360D rotated table detection dataset was created by constraining the starting point and annotation direction, and is publicly available at https://github.com/vansin/TRR360D.
DART-Math: Difficulty-Aware Rejection Tuning for Mathematical Problem-Solving
Solving mathematical problems requires advanced reasoning abilities and presents notable challenges for large language models. Previous works usually synthesize data from proprietary models to augment existing datasets, followed by instruction tuning to achieve top-tier results. However, our analysis of these datasets reveals severe biases towards easy queries, with frequent failures to generate any correct response for the most challenging queries. Hypothesizing that difficult queries are crucial to learn complex reasoning, we propose Difficulty-Aware Rejection Tuning (DART), a method that allocates difficult queries more trials during the synthesis phase, enabling more extensive training on difficult samples. Utilizing DART, we have created new datasets for mathematical problem-solving that focus more on difficult queries and are substantially smaller than previous ones. Remarkably, our synthesis process solely relies on a 7B-sized open-weight model, without reliance on the commonly used proprietary GPT-4. We fine-tune various base models on our datasets ranging from 7B to 70B in size, resulting in a series of strong models called DART-MATH. In comprehensive in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation on 6 mathematical benchmarks, DART-MATH outperforms vanilla rejection tuning significantly, being superior or comparable to previous arts, despite using much smaller datasets and no proprietary models. Furthermore, our results position our synthetic datasets as the most effective and cost-efficient publicly available resources for advancing mathematical problem-solving.
Distiller: A Systematic Study of Model Distillation Methods in Natural Language Processing
We aim to identify how different components in the KD pipeline affect the resulting performance and how much the optimal KD pipeline varies across different datasets/tasks, such as the data augmentation policy, the loss function, and the intermediate representation for transferring the knowledge between teacher and student. To tease apart their effects, we propose Distiller, a meta KD framework that systematically combines a broad range of techniques across different stages of the KD pipeline, which enables us to quantify each component's contribution. Within Distiller, we unify commonly used objectives for distillation of intermediate representations under a universal mutual information (MI) objective and propose a class of MI-alpha objective functions with better bias/variance trade-off for estimating the MI between the teacher and the student. On a diverse set of NLP datasets, the best Distiller configurations are identified via large-scale hyperparameter optimization. Our experiments reveal the following: 1) the approach used to distill the intermediate representations is the most important factor in KD performance, 2) among different objectives for intermediate distillation, MI-alpha performs the best, and 3) data augmentation provides a large boost for small training datasets or small student networks. Moreover, we find that different datasets/tasks prefer different KD algorithms, and thus propose a simple AutoDistiller algorithm that can recommend a good KD pipeline for a new dataset.
AutoGluon-Tabular: Robust and Accurate AutoML for Structured Data
We introduce AutoGluon-Tabular, an open-source AutoML framework that requires only a single line of Python to train highly accurate machine learning models on an unprocessed tabular dataset such as a CSV file. Unlike existing AutoML frameworks that primarily focus on model/hyperparameter selection, AutoGluon-Tabular succeeds by ensembling multiple models and stacking them in multiple layers. Experiments reveal that our multi-layer combination of many models offers better use of allocated training time than seeking out the best. A second contribution is an extensive evaluation of public and commercial AutoML platforms including TPOT, H2O, AutoWEKA, auto-sklearn, AutoGluon, and Google AutoML Tables. Tests on a suite of 50 classification and regression tasks from Kaggle and the OpenML AutoML Benchmark reveal that AutoGluon is faster, more robust, and much more accurate. We find that AutoGluon often even outperforms the best-in-hindsight combination of all of its competitors. In two popular Kaggle competitions, AutoGluon beat 99% of the participating data scientists after merely 4h of training on the raw data.
APIGen: Automated Pipeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasets
The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset is available on Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/xlam-function-calling-60k and the project homepage: https://apigen-pipeline.github.io/
WIT-UAS: A Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal Dataset to Detect Crew Assets From Aerial Views
We present the Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal (WIT-UAS) dataset for long-wave infrared sensing of crew and vehicle assets amidst prescribed wildland fire environments. While such a dataset is crucial for safety monitoring in wildland fire applications, to the authors' awareness, no such dataset focusing on assets near fire is publicly available. Presumably, this is due to the barrier to entry of collaborating with fire management personnel. We present two related data subsets: WIT-UAS-ROS consists of full ROS bag files containing sensor and robot data of UAS flight over the fire, and WIT-UAS-Image contains hand-labeled long-wave infrared (LWIR) images extracted from WIT-UAS-ROS. Our dataset is the first to focus on asset detection in a wildland fire environment. We show that thermal detection models trained without fire data frequently detect false positives by classifying fire as people. By adding our dataset to training, we show that the false positive rate is reduced significantly. Yet asset detection in wildland fire environments is still significantly more challenging than detection in urban environments, due to dense obscuring trees, greater heat variation, and overbearing thermal signal of the fire. We publicize this dataset to encourage the community to study more advanced models to tackle this challenging environment. The dataset, code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/castacks/WIT-UAS-Dataset.
AutoFish: Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-grained Analysis of Fish
Automated fish documentation processes are in the near future expected to play an essential role in sustainable fisheries management and for addressing challenges of overfishing. In this paper, we present a novel and publicly available dataset named AutoFish designed for fine-grained fish analysis. The dataset comprises 1,500 images of 454 specimens of visually similar fish placed in various constellations on a white conveyor belt and annotated with instance segmentation masks, IDs, and length measurements. The data was collected in a controlled environment using an RGB camera. The annotation procedure involved manual point annotations, initial segmentation masks proposed by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), and subsequent manual correction of the masks. We establish baseline instance segmentation results using two variations of the Mask2Former architecture, with the best performing model reaching an mAP of 89.15%. Additionally, we present two baseline length estimation methods, the best performing being a custom MobileNetV2-based regression model reaching an MAE of 0.62cm in images with no occlusion and 1.38cm in images with occlusion. Link to project page: https://vap.aau.dk/autofish/.
MORDA: A Synthetic Dataset to Facilitate Adaptation of Object Detectors to Unseen Real-target Domain While Preserving Performance on Real-source Domain
Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.
DataPerf: Benchmarks for Data-Centric AI Development
Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.
Natural Adversarial Examples
We introduce two challenging datasets that reliably cause machine learning model performance to substantially degrade. The datasets are collected with a simple adversarial filtration technique to create datasets with limited spurious cues. Our datasets' real-world, unmodified examples transfer to various unseen models reliably, demonstrating that computer vision models have shared weaknesses. The first dataset is called ImageNet-A and is like the ImageNet test set, but it is far more challenging for existing models. We also curate an adversarial out-of-distribution detection dataset called ImageNet-O, which is the first out-of-distribution detection dataset created for ImageNet models. On ImageNet-A a DenseNet-121 obtains around 2% accuracy, an accuracy drop of approximately 90%, and its out-of-distribution detection performance on ImageNet-O is near random chance levels. We find that existing data augmentation techniques hardly boost performance, and using other public training datasets provides improvements that are limited. However, we find that improvements to computer vision architectures provide a promising path towards robust models.
BIKED++: A Multimodal Dataset of 1.4 Million Bicycle Image and Parametric CAD Designs
This paper introduces a public dataset of 1.4 million procedurally-generated bicycle designs represented parametrically, as JSON files, and as rasterized images. The dataset is created through the use of a rendering engine which harnesses the BikeCAD software to generate vector graphics from parametric designs. This rendering engine is discussed in the paper and also released publicly alongside the dataset. Though this dataset has numerous applications, a principal motivation is the need to train cross-modal predictive models between parametric and image-based design representations. For example, we demonstrate that a predictive model can be trained to accurately estimate Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) embeddings from a parametric representation directly. This allows similarity relations to be established between parametric bicycle designs and text strings or reference images. Trained predictive models are also made public. The dataset joins the BIKED dataset family which includes thousands of mixed-representation human-designed bicycle models and several datasets quantifying design performance. The code and dataset can be found at: https://github.com/Lyleregenwetter/BIKED_multimodal/tree/main
Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control
There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.
AutoMathText: Autonomous Data Selection with Language Models for Mathematical Texts
To improve language models' proficiency in mathematical reasoning via continual pretraining, we introduce a novel strategy that leverages base language models for autonomous data selection. Departing from conventional supervised fine-tuning or trained classifiers with human-annotated data, our approach utilizes meta-prompted language models as zero-shot verifiers to autonomously evaluate and select high-quality mathematical content, and we release the curated open-source AutoMathText dataset encompassing over 200GB of data. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we continuously pretrained a 7B-parameter Mistral language model on the AutoMathText dataset, achieving substantial improvements in downstream performance on the MATH dataset with a token amount reduced by orders of magnitude compared to previous continuous pretraining works. Our method showcases a 2 times increase in pretraining token efficiency compared to baselines, underscoring the potential of our approach in enhancing models' mathematical reasoning capabilities. The AutoMathText dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/AutoMathText. The code is available at https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/AutoMathText.
On the Diversity and Realism of Distilled Dataset: An Efficient Dataset Distillation Paradigm
Contemporary machine learning requires training large neural networks on massive datasets and thus faces the challenges of high computational demands. Dataset distillation, as a recent emerging strategy, aims to compress real-world datasets for efficient training. However, this line of research currently struggle with large-scale and high-resolution datasets, hindering its practicality and feasibility. To this end, we re-examine the existing dataset distillation methods and identify three properties required for large-scale real-world applications, namely, realism, diversity, and efficiency. As a remedy, we propose RDED, a novel computationally-efficient yet effective data distillation paradigm, to enable both diversity and realism of the distilled data. Extensive empirical results over various neural architectures and datasets demonstrate the advancement of RDED: we can distill the full ImageNet-1K to a small dataset comprising 10 images per class within 7 minutes, achieving a notable 42% top-1 accuracy with ResNet-18 on a single RTX-4090 GPU (while the SOTA only achieves 21% but requires 6 hours).
R2D2: Reducing Redundancy and Duplication in Data Lakes
Enterprise data lakes often suffer from substantial amounts of duplicate and redundant data, with data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This leads to both increased storage costs and unnecessarily high maintenance costs for these datasets. In this work, we focus on identifying and reducing redundancy in enterprise data lakes by addressing the problem of 'dataset containment'. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works that addresses table-level containment at a large scale. We propose R2D2: a three-step hierarchical pipeline that efficiently identifies almost all instances of containment by progressively reducing the search space in the data lake. It first builds (i) a schema containment graph, followed by (ii) statistical min-max pruning, and finally, (iii) content level pruning. We further propose minimizing the total storage and access costs by optimally identifying redundant datasets that can be deleted (and reconstructed on demand) while respecting latency constraints. We implement our system on Azure Databricks clusters using Apache Spark for enterprise data stored in ADLS Gen2, and on AWS clusters for open-source data. In contrast to existing modified baselines that are inaccurate or take several days to run, our pipeline can process an enterprise customer data lake at the TB scale in approximately 5 hours with high accuracy. We present theoretical results as well as extensive empirical validation on both enterprise (scale of TBs) and open-source datasets (scale of MBs - GBs), which showcase the effectiveness of our pipeline.
AutoMMLab: Automatically Generating Deployable Models from Language Instructions for Computer Vision Tasks
Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a collection of techniques designed to automate the machine learning development process. While traditional AutoML approaches have been successfully applied in several critical steps of model development (e.g. hyperparameter optimization), there lacks a AutoML system that automates the entire end-to-end model production workflow. To fill this blank, we present AutoMMLab, a general-purpose LLM-empowered AutoML system that follows user's language instructions to automate the whole model production workflow for computer vision tasks. The proposed AutoMMLab system effectively employs LLMs as the bridge to connect AutoML and OpenMMLab community, empowering non-expert individuals to easily build task-specific models via a user-friendly language interface. Specifically, we propose RU-LLaMA to understand users' request and schedule the whole pipeline, and propose a novel LLM-based hyperparameter optimizer called HPO-LLaMA to effectively search for the optimal hyperparameters. Experiments show that our AutoMMLab system is versatile and covers a wide range of mainstream tasks, including classification, detection, segmentation and keypoint estimation. We further develop a new benchmark, called LAMP, for studying key components in the end-to-end prompt-based model training pipeline. Code, model, and data will be released.
UHD-IQA Benchmark Database: Pushing the Boundaries of Blind Photo Quality Assessment
We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html
A Systematic Review on Computer Vision-Based Parking Lot Management Applied on Public Datasets
Computer vision-based parking lot management methods have been extensively researched upon owing to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness. To evaluate such methods authors often employ publicly available parking lot image datasets. In this study, we surveyed and compared robust publicly available image datasets specifically crafted to test computer vision-based methods for parking lot management approaches and consequently present a systematic and comprehensive review of existing works that employ such datasets. The literature review identified relevant gaps that require further research, such as the requirement of dataset-independent approaches and methods suitable for autonomous detection of position of parking spaces. In addition, we have noticed that several important factors such as the presence of the same cars across consecutive images, have been neglected in most studies, thereby rendering unrealistic assessment protocols. Furthermore, the analysis of the datasets also revealed that certain features that should be present when developing new benchmarks, such as the availability of video sequences and images taken in more diverse conditions, including nighttime and snow, have not been incorporated.
Learning to Fly by Crashing
How do you learn to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and avoid obstacles? One approach is to use a small dataset collected by human experts: however, high capacity learning algorithms tend to overfit when trained with little data. An alternative is to use simulation. But the gap between simulation and real world remains large especially for perception problems. The reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes! In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects: it samples naive trajectories and crashes into random objects. We crash our drone 11,500 times to create one of the biggest UAV crash dataset. This dataset captures the different ways in which a UAV can crash. We use all this negative flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. We show that this simple self-supervised model is quite effective in navigating the UAV even in extremely cluttered environments with dynamic obstacles including humans. For supplementary video see: https://youtu.be/u151hJaGKUo
VDD: Varied Drone Dataset for Semantic Segmentation
Semantic segmentation of drone images is critical for various aerial vision tasks as it provides essential semantic details to understand scenes on the ground. Ensuring high accuracy of semantic segmentation models for drones requires access to diverse, large-scale, and high-resolution datasets, which are often scarce in the field of aerial image processing. While existing datasets typically focus on urban scenes and are relatively small, our Varied Drone Dataset (VDD) addresses these limitations by offering a large-scale, densely labeled collection of 400 high-resolution images spanning 7 classes. This dataset features various scenes in urban, industrial, rural, and natural areas, captured from different camera angles and under diverse lighting conditions. We also make new annotations to UDD and UAVid, integrating them under VDD annotation standards, to create the Integrated Drone Dataset (IDD). We train seven state-of-the-art models on drone datasets as baselines. It's expected that our dataset will generate considerable interest in drone image segmentation and serve as a foundation for other drone vision tasks. Datasets are publicly available at our website{https://github.com/RussRobin/VDD}.
Improving Adversarial Data Collection by Supporting Annotators: Lessons from GAHD, a German Hate Speech Dataset
Hate speech detection models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Datasets sourced from social media suffer from systematic gaps and biases, leading to unreliable models with simplistic decision boundaries. Adversarial datasets, collected by exploiting model weaknesses, promise to fix this problem. However, adversarial data collection can be slow and costly, and individual annotators have limited creativity. In this paper, we introduce GAHD, a new German Adversarial Hate speech Dataset comprising ca.\ 11k examples. During data collection, we explore new strategies for supporting annotators, to create more diverse adversarial examples more efficiently and provide a manual analysis of annotator disagreements for each strategy. Our experiments show that the resulting dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art hate speech detection models, and that training on GAHD clearly improves model robustness. Further, we find that mixing multiple support strategies is most advantageous. We make GAHD publicly available at https://github.com/jagol/gahd.
MIMII DG: Sound Dataset for Malfunctioning Industrial Machine Investigation and Inspection for Domain Generalization Task
We present a machine sound dataset to benchmark domain generalization techniques for anomalous sound detection (ASD). Domain shifts are differences in data distributions that can degrade the detection performance, and handling them is a major issue for the application of ASD systems. While currently available datasets for ASD tasks assume that occurrences of domain shifts are known, in practice, they can be difficult to detect. To handle such domain shifts, domain generalization techniques that perform well regardless of the domains should be investigated. In this paper, we present the first ASD dataset for the domain generalization techniques, called MIMII DG. The dataset consists of five machine types and three domain shift scenarios for each machine type. The dataset is dedicated to the domain generalization task with features such as multiple different values for parameters that cause domain shifts and introduction of domain shifts that can be difficult to detect, such as shifts in the background noise. Experimental results using two baseline systems indicate that the dataset reproduces domain shift scenarios and is useful for benchmarking domain generalization techniques.
A Countrywide Traffic Accident Dataset
Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge. However, the majority of studies on traffic accident analysis and prediction have used small-scale datasets with limited coverage, which limits their impact and applicability; and existing large-scale datasets are either private, old, or do not include important contextual information such as environmental stimuli (weather, points-of-interest, etc.). In order to help the research community address these shortcomings we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. US-Accidents currently contains data about 2.25 million instances of traffic accidents that took place within the contiguous United States, and over the last three years. Each accident record consists of a variety of intrinsic and contextual attributes such as location, time, natural language description, weather, period-of-day, and points-of-interest. We present this dataset in this paper, along with a wide range of insights gleaned from this dataset with respect to the spatiotemporal characteristics of accidents. The dataset is publicly available at https://smoosavi.org/datasets/us_accidents.
VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age
In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimize the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS- Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on all the IARPA Janus face recognition benchmarks, e.g. IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. Datasets and models are publicly available.
FLAML: A Fast and Lightweight AutoML Library
We study the problem of using low computational cost to automate the choices of learners and hyperparameters for an ad-hoc training dataset and error metric, by conducting trials of different configurations on the given training data. We investigate the joint impact of multiple factors on both trial cost and model error, and propose several design guidelines. Following them, we build a fast and lightweight library FLAML which optimizes for low computational resource in finding accurate models. FLAML integrates several simple but effective search strategies into an adaptive system. It significantly outperforms top-ranked AutoML libraries on a large open source AutoML benchmark under equal, or sometimes orders of magnitude smaller budget constraints.
Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development
Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.
CartoMark: a benchmark dataset for map pattern recognition and 1 map content retrieval with machine intelligence
Maps are fundamental medium to visualize and represent the real word in a simple and 16 philosophical way. The emergence of the 3rd wave information has made a proportion of maps are available to be generated ubiquitously, which would significantly enrich the dimensions and perspectives to understand the characteristics of the real world. However, a majority of map dataset have never been discovered, acquired and effectively used, and the map data used in many applications might not be completely fitted for the authentic demands of these applications. This challenge is emerged due to the lack of numerous well-labelled benchmark datasets for implementing the deep learning approaches into identifying complicated map content. Thus, we develop a large-scale benchmark dataset that includes well-labelled dataset for map text annotation recognition, map scene classification, map super-resolution reconstruction, and map style transferring. Furthermore, these well-labelled datasets would facilitate the state-of-the-art machine intelligence technologies to conduct map feature detection, map pattern recognition and map content retrieval. We hope our efforts would be useful for AI-enhanced cartographical applications.
PTMTorrent: A Dataset for Mining Open-source Pre-trained Model Packages
Due to the cost of developing and training deep learning models from scratch, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune them for downstream tasks. PTM registries known as "model hubs" support engineers in distributing and reusing deep learning models. PTM packages include pre-trained weights, documentation, model architectures, datasets, and metadata. Mining the information in PTM packages will enable the discovery of engineering phenomena and tools to support software engineers. However, accessing this information is difficult - there are many PTM registries, and both the registries and the individual packages may have rate limiting for accessing the data. We present an open-source dataset, PTMTorrent, to facilitate the evaluation and understanding of PTM packages. This paper describes the creation, structure, usage, and limitations of the dataset. The dataset includes a snapshot of 5 model hubs and a total of 15,913 PTM packages. These packages are represented in a uniform data schema for cross-hub mining. We describe prior uses of this data and suggest research opportunities for mining using our dataset. The PTMTorrent dataset (v1) is available at: https://app.globus.org/file-manager?origin_id=55e17a6e-9d8f-11ed-a2a2-8383522b48d9&origin_path=%2F~%2F. Our dataset generation tools are available on GitHub: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7570357.
MMSci: A Multimodal Multi-Discipline Dataset for PhD-Level Scientific Comprehension
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has heightened the demand for AI-based scientific assistants capable of understanding scientific articles and figures. Despite progress, there remains a significant gap in evaluating models' comprehension of professional, graduate-level, and even PhD-level scientific content. Current datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on relatively simple scientific tasks and figures, lacking comprehensive assessments across diverse advanced scientific disciplines. To bridge this gap, we collected a multimodal, multidisciplinary dataset from open-access scientific articles published in Nature Communications journals. This dataset spans 72 scientific disciplines, ensuring both diversity and quality. We created benchmarks with various tasks and settings to comprehensively evaluate LMMs' capabilities in understanding scientific figures and content. Our evaluation revealed that these tasks are highly challenging: many open-source models struggled significantly, and even GPT-4V and GPT-4o faced difficulties. We also explored using our dataset as training resources by constructing visual instruction-following data, enabling the 7B LLaVA model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4V/o on our benchmark. Additionally, we investigated the use of our interleaved article texts and figure images for pre-training LMMs, resulting in improvements on the material generation task. The source dataset, including articles, figures, constructed benchmarks, and visual instruction-following data, is open-sourced.
Benchmarking Multimodal AutoML for Tabular Data with Text Fields
We consider the use of automated supervised learning systems for data tables that not only contain numeric/categorical columns, but one or more text fields as well. Here we assemble 18 multimodal data tables that each contain some text fields and stem from a real business application. Our publicly-available benchmark enables researchers to comprehensively evaluate their own methods for supervised learning with numeric, categorical, and text features. To ensure that any single modeling strategy which performs well over all 18 datasets will serve as a practical foundation for multimodal text/tabular AutoML, the diverse datasets in our benchmark vary greatly in: sample size, problem types (a mix of classification and regression tasks), number of features (with the number of text columns ranging from 1 to 28 between datasets), as well as how the predictive signal is decomposed between text vs. numeric/categorical features (and predictive interactions thereof). Over this benchmark, we evaluate various straightforward pipelines to model such data, including standard two-stage approaches where NLP is used to featurize the text such that AutoML for tabular data can then be applied. Compared with human data science teams, the fully automated methodology that performed best on our benchmark (stack ensembling a multimodal Transformer with various tree models) also manages to rank 1st place when fit to the raw text/tabular data in two MachineHack prediction competitions and 2nd place (out of 2380 teams) in Kaggle's Mercari Price Suggestion Challenge.
Arboretum: A Large Multimodal Dataset Enabling AI for Biodiversity
We introduce Arboretum, the largest publicly accessible dataset designed to advance AI for biodiversity applications. This dataset, curated from the iNaturalist community science platform and vetted by domain experts to ensure accuracy, includes 134.6 million images, surpassing existing datasets in scale by an order of magnitude. The dataset encompasses image-language paired data for a diverse set of species from birds (Aves), spiders/ticks/mites (Arachnida), insects (Insecta), plants (Plantae), fungus/mushrooms (Fungi), snails (Mollusca), and snakes/lizards (Reptilia), making it a valuable resource for multimodal vision-language AI models for biodiversity assessment and agriculture research. Each image is annotated with scientific names, taxonomic details, and common names, enhancing the robustness of AI model training. We showcase the value of Arboretum by releasing a suite of CLIP models trained using a subset of 40 million captioned images. We introduce several new benchmarks for rigorous assessment, report accuracy for zero-shot learning, and evaluations across life stages, rare species, confounding species, and various levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. We anticipate that Arboretum will spur the development of AI models that can enable a variety of digital tools ranging from pest control strategies, crop monitoring, and worldwide biodiversity assessment and environmental conservation. These advancements are critical for ensuring food security, preserving ecosystems, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Arboretum is publicly available, easily accessible, and ready for immediate use. Please see the https://baskargroup.github.io/Arboretum/{project website} for links to our data, models, and code.
Multi-Environment Pretraining Enables Transfer to Action Limited Datasets
Using massive datasets to train large-scale models has emerged as a dominant approach for broad generalization in natural language and vision applications. In reinforcement learning, however, a key challenge is that available data of sequential decision making is often not annotated with actions - for example, videos of game-play are much more available than sequences of frames paired with their logged game controls. We propose to circumvent this challenge by combining large but sparsely-annotated datasets from a target environment of interest with fully-annotated datasets from various other source environments. Our method, Action Limited PreTraining (ALPT), leverages the generalization capabilities of inverse dynamics modelling (IDM) to label missing action data in the target environment. We show that utilizing even one additional environment dataset of labelled data during IDM pretraining gives rise to substantial improvements in generating action labels for unannotated sequences. We evaluate our method on benchmark game-playing environments and show that we can significantly improve game performance and generalization capability compared to other approaches, using annotated datasets equivalent to only 12 minutes of gameplay. Highlighting the power of IDM, we show that these benefits remain even when target and source environments share no common actions.
HEp-2 Cell Image Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Efficient Human Epithelial-2 (HEp-2) cell image classification can facilitate the diagnosis of many autoimmune diseases. This paper presents an automatic framework for this classification task, by utilizing the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which have recently attracted intensive attention in visual recognition. This paper elaborates the important components of this framework, discusses multiple key factors that impact the efficiency of training a deep CNN, and systematically compares this framework with the well-established image classification models in the literature. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that i) the proposed framework can effectively outperform existing models by properly applying data augmentation; ii) our CNN-based framework demonstrates excellent adaptability across different datasets, which is highly desirable for classification under varying laboratory settings. Our system is ranked high in the cell image classification competition hosted by ICPR 2014.
ARCOQ: Arabic Closest Opposite Questions Dataset
This paper presents a dataset for closest opposite questions in Arabic language. The dataset is the first of its kind for the Arabic language. It is beneficial for the assessment of systems on the aspect of antonymy detection. The structure is similar to that of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) closest opposite questions dataset for the English language. The introduced dataset consists of 500 questions, each contains a query word for which the closest opposite needs to be determined from among a set of candidate words. Each question is also associated with the correct answer. We publish the dataset publicly in addition to providing standard splits of the dataset into development and test sets. Moreover, the paper provides a benchmark for the performance of different Arabic word embedding models on the introduced dataset.
Taking Human out of Learning Applications: A Survey on Automated Machine Learning
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.
DriverGym: Democratising Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
Despite promising progress in reinforcement learning (RL), developing algorithms for autonomous driving (AD) remains challenging: one of the critical issues being the absence of an open-source platform capable of training and effectively validating the RL policies on real-world data. We propose DriverGym, an open-source OpenAI Gym-compatible environment specifically tailored for developing RL algorithms for autonomous driving. DriverGym provides access to more than 1000 hours of expert logged data and also supports reactive and data-driven agent behavior. The performance of an RL policy can be easily validated on real-world data using our extensive and flexible closed-loop evaluation protocol. In this work, we also provide behavior cloning baselines using supervised learning and RL, trained in DriverGym. We make DriverGym code, as well as all the baselines publicly available to further stimulate development from the community.
A Large-scale Dataset with Behavior, Attributes, and Content of Mobile Short-video Platform
Short-video platforms show an increasing impact on people's daily lives nowadays, with billions of active users spending plenty of time each day. The interactions between users and online platforms give rise to many scientific problems across computational social science and artificial intelligence. However, despite the rapid development of short-video platforms, currently there are serious shortcomings in existing relevant datasets on three aspects: inadequate user-video feedback, limited user attributes and lack of video content. To address these problems, we provide a large-scale dataset with rich user behavior, attributes and video content from a real mobile short-video platform. This dataset covers 10,000 voluntary users and 153,561 videos, and we conduct four-fold technical validations of the dataset. First, we verify the richness of the behavior and attribute data. Second, we confirm the representing ability of the content features. Third, we provide benchmarking results on recommendation algorithms with our dataset. Finally, we explore the filter bubble phenomenon on the platform using the dataset. We believe the dataset could support the broad research community, including but not limited to user modeling, social science, human behavior understanding, etc. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/ShortVideo_dataset.
GRANDE: Gradient-Based Decision Tree Ensembles for Tabular Data
Despite the success of deep learning for text and image data, tree-based ensemble models are still state-of-the-art for machine learning with heterogeneous tabular data. However, there is a significant need for tabular-specific gradient-based methods due to their high flexibility. In this paper, we propose GRANDE, GRAdieNt-Based Decision Tree Ensembles, a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned decision tree ensembles using end-to-end gradient descent. GRANDE is based on a dense representation of tree ensembles, which affords to use backpropagation with a straight-through operator to jointly optimize all model parameters. Our method combines axis-aligned splits, which is a useful inductive bias for tabular data, with the flexibility of gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced instance-wise weighting that facilitates learning representations for both, simple and complex relations, within a single model. We conducted an extensive evaluation on a predefined benchmark with 19 classification datasets and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing gradient-boosting and deep learning frameworks on most datasets. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GRANDE
DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets
Large multimodal datasets have been instrumental in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-4. At the same time, datasets rarely receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a benchmark where the training code is fixed and researchers innovate by proposing new training sets. We provide a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8B image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple scales, with four candidate pool sizes and associated compute budgets ranging from 12.8M to 12.8B samples seen during training. This multi-scale design facilitates the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow is a promising way of improving multimodal datasets. We introduce DataComp-1B, a dataset created by applying a simple filtering algorithm to the 12.8B candidate pool. The resulting 1.4B subset enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. Our new ViT-L/14 model outperforms a larger ViT-g/14 trained on LAION-2B by 0.7 percentage points while requiring 9x less training compute. We also outperform OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points, which is trained with the same compute budget as our model. These gains highlight the potential for improving model performance by carefully curating training sets. We view DataComp-1B as only the first step and hope that DataComp paves the way toward the next generation of multimodal datasets.
A9 Intersection Dataset: All You Need for Urban 3D Camera-LiDAR Roadside Perception
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) allow a drastic expansion of the visibility range and decrease occlusions for autonomous driving. To obtain accurate detections, detailed labeled sensor data for training is required. Unfortunately, high-quality 3D labels of LiDAR point clouds from the infrastructure perspective of an intersection are still rare. Therefore, we provide the A9 Intersection Dataset, which consists of labeled LiDAR point clouds and synchronized camera images. Here, we recorded the sensor output from two roadside cameras and LiDARs mounted on intersection gantry bridges. The point clouds were labeled in 3D by experienced annotators. Furthermore, we provide calibration data between all sensors, which allow the projection of the 3D labels into the camera images and an accurate data fusion. Our dataset consists of 4.8k images and point clouds with more than 57.4k manually labeled 3D boxes. With ten object classes, it has a high diversity of road users in complex driving maneuvers, such as left and right turns, overtaking, and U-turns. In experiments, we provided multiple baselines for the perception tasks. Overall, our dataset is a valuable contribution to the scientific community to perform complex 3D camera-LiDAR roadside perception tasks. Find data, code, and more information at https://a9-dataset.com.
Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video
Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.
Scalable Reinforcement-Learning-Based Neural Architecture Search for Cancer Deep Learning Research
Cancer is a complex disease, the understanding and treatment of which are being aided through increases in the volume of collected data and in the scale of deployed computing power. Consequently, there is a growing need for the development of data-driven and, in particular, deep learning methods for various tasks such as cancer diagnosis, detection, prognosis, and prediction. Despite recent successes, however, designing high-performing deep learning models for nonimage and nontext cancer data is a time-consuming, trial-and-error, manual task that requires both cancer domain and deep learning expertise. To that end, we develop a reinforcement-learning-based neural architecture search to automate deep-learning-based predictive model development for a class of representative cancer data. We develop custom building blocks that allow domain experts to incorporate the cancer-data-specific characteristics. We show that our approach discovers deep neural network architectures that have significantly fewer trainable parameters, shorter training time, and accuracy similar to or higher than those of manually designed architectures. We study and demonstrate the scalability of our approach on up to 1,024 Intel Knights Landing nodes of the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
In Rain or Shine: Understanding and Overcoming Dataset Bias for Improving Robustness Against Weather Corruptions for Autonomous Vehicles
Several popular computer vision (CV) datasets, specifically employed for Object Detection (OD) in autonomous driving tasks exhibit biases due to a range of factors including weather and lighting conditions. These biases may impair a model's generalizability, rendering it ineffective for OD in novel and unseen datasets. Especially, in autonomous driving, it may prove extremely high risk and unsafe for the vehicle and its surroundings. This work focuses on understanding these datasets better by identifying such "good-weather" bias. Methods to mitigate such bias which allows the OD models to perform better and improve the robustness are also demonstrated. A simple yet effective OD framework for studying bias mitigation is proposed. Using this framework, the performance on popular datasets is analyzed and a significant difference in model performance is observed. Additionally, a knowledge transfer technique and a synthetic image corruption technique are proposed to mitigate the identified bias. Finally, using the DAWN dataset, the findings are validated on the OD task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our techniques in mitigating real-world "good-weather" bias. The experiments show that the proposed techniques outperform baseline methods by averaged fourfold improvement.
Rethink DARTS Search Space and Renovate a New Benchmark
DARTS search space (DSS) has become a canonical benchmark for NAS whereas some emerging works pointed out the issue of narrow accuracy range and claimed it would hurt the method ranking. We observe some recent studies already suffer from this issue that overshadows the meaning of scores. In this work, we first propose and orchestrate a suite of improvements to frame a larger and harder DSS, termed LHD, while retaining high efficiency in search. We step forward to renovate a LHD-based new benchmark, taking care of both discernibility and accessibility. Specifically, we re-implement twelve baselines and evaluate them across twelve conditions by combining two underexpolored influential factors: transductive robustness and discretization policy, to reasonably construct a benchmark upon multi-condition evaluation. Considering that the tabular benchmarks are always insufficient to adequately evaluate the methods of neural architecture search (NAS), our work can serve as a crucial basis for the future progress of NAS. https://github.com/chaoji90/LHD
Automated Deep Learning: Neural Architecture Search Is Not the End
Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a highly effective approach for developing models in diverse contexts, including visual perception, speech recognition, and machine translation. However, the end-to-end process for applying DL is not trivial. It requires grappling with problem formulation and context understanding, data engineering, model development, deployment, continuous monitoring and maintenance, and so on. Moreover, each of these steps typically relies heavily on humans, in terms of both knowledge and interactions, which impedes the further advancement and democratization of DL. Consequently, in response to these issues, a new field has emerged over the last few years: automated deep learning (AutoDL). This endeavor seeks to minimize the need for human involvement and is best known for its achievements in neural architecture search (NAS), a topic that has been the focus of several surveys. That stated, NAS is not the be-all and end-all of AutoDL. Accordingly, this review adopts an overarching perspective, examining research efforts into automation across the entirety of an archetypal DL workflow. In so doing, this work also proposes a comprehensive set of ten criteria by which to assess existing work in both individual publications and broader research areas. These criteria are: novelty, solution quality, efficiency, stability, interpretability, reproducibility, engineering quality, scalability, generalizability, and eco-friendliness. Thus, ultimately, this review provides an evaluative overview of AutoDL in the early 2020s, identifying where future opportunities for progress may exist.
T2Vs Meet VLMs: A Scalable Multimodal Dataset for Visual Harmfulness Recognition
To address the risks of encountering inappropriate or harmful content, researchers managed to incorporate several harmful contents datasets with machine learning methods to detect harmful concepts. However, existing harmful datasets are curated by the presence of a narrow range of harmful objects, and only cover real harmful content sources. This hinders the generalizability of methods based on such datasets, potentially leading to misjudgments. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive harmful dataset, Visual Harmful Dataset 11K (VHD11K), consisting of 10,000 images and 1,000 videos, crawled from the Internet and generated by 4 generative models, across a total of 10 harmful categories covering a full spectrum of harmful concepts with nontrivial definition. We also propose a novel annotation framework by formulating the annotation process as a multi-agent Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, having 3 different VLMs "debate" about whether the given image/video is harmful, and incorporating the in-context learning strategy in the debating process. Therefore, we can ensure that the VLMs consider the context of the given image/video and both sides of the arguments thoroughly before making decisions, further reducing the likelihood of misjudgments in edge cases. Evaluation and experimental results demonstrate that (1) the great alignment between the annotation from our novel annotation framework and those from human, ensuring the reliability of VHD11K; (2) our full-spectrum harmful dataset successfully identifies the inability of existing harmful content detection methods to detect extensive harmful contents and improves the performance of existing harmfulness recognition methods; (3) VHD11K outperforms the baseline dataset, SMID, as evidenced by the superior improvement in harmfulness recognition methods. The complete dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/nctu-eva-lab/VHD11K.
CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL
Language models have shown promising performance on the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL). However, most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches rely on powerful yet closed-source large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, which may have the limitations of unclear model architectures, data privacy risks, and expensive inference overheads. To address the limitations, we introduce CodeS, a series of pre-trained language models with parameters ranging from 1B to 15B, specifically designed for the text-to-SQL task. CodeS is a fully open-source language model, which achieves superior accuracy with much smaller parameter sizes. This paper studies the research challenges in building CodeS. To enhance the SQL generation abilities of CodeS, we adopt an incremental pre-training approach using a specifically curated SQL-centric corpus. Based on this, we address the challenges of schema linking and rapid domain adaptation through strategic prompt construction and a bi-directional data augmentation technique. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including the widely used Spider benchmark, the newly released BIRD benchmark, robustness-diagnostic benchmarks such as Spider-DK, Spider-Syn, Spider-Realistic, and Dr.Spider, as well as two real-world datasets created for financial and academic applications. The experimental results show that our CodeS achieves new SOTA accuracy and robustness on nearly all challenging text-to-SQL benchmarks.
AutoOD: Automated Outlier Detection via Curiosity-guided Search and Self-imitation Learning
Outlier detection is an important data mining task with numerous practical applications such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific complicated task with big data, the process of building a powerful deep learning based system for outlier detection still highly relies on human expertise and laboring trials. Although Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown its promise in discovering effective deep architectures in various domains, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, contemporary NAS methods are not suitable for outlier detection due to the lack of intrinsic search space, unstable search process, and low sample efficiency. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose AutoOD, an automated outlier detection framework, which aims to search for an optimal neural network model within a predefined search space. Specifically, we firstly design a curiosity-guided search strategy to overcome the curse of local optimality. A controller, which acts as a search agent, is encouraged to take actions to maximize the information gain about the controller's internal belief. We further introduce an experience replay mechanism based on self-imitation learning to improve the sample efficiency. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the deep model identified by AutoOD achieves the best performance, comparing with existing handcrafted models and traditional search methods.
Bamboo: Building Mega-Scale Vision Dataset Continually with Human-Machine Synergy
Large-scale datasets play a vital role in computer vision. But current datasets are annotated blindly without differentiation to samples, making the data collection inefficient and unscalable. The open question is how to build a mega-scale dataset actively. Although advanced active learning algorithms might be the answer, we experimentally found that they are lame in the realistic annotation scenario where out-of-distribution data is extensive. This work thus proposes a novel active learning framework for realistic dataset annotation. Equipped with this framework, we build a high-quality vision dataset -- Bamboo, which consists of 69M image classification annotations with 119K categories and 28M object bounding box annotations with 809 categories. We organize these categories by a hierarchical taxonomy integrated from several knowledge bases. The classification annotations are four times larger than ImageNet22K, and that of detection is three times larger than Object365. Compared to ImageNet22K and Objects365, models pre-trained on Bamboo achieve superior performance among various downstream tasks (6.2% gains on classification and 2.1% gains on detection). We believe our active learning framework and Bamboo are essential for future work.
DeepArchitect: Automatically Designing and Training Deep Architectures
In deep learning, performance is strongly affected by the choice of architecture and hyperparameters. While there has been extensive work on automatic hyperparameter optimization for simple spaces, complex spaces such as the space of deep architectures remain largely unexplored. As a result, the choice of architecture is done manually by the human expert through a slow trial and error process guided mainly by intuition. In this paper we describe a framework for automatically designing and training deep models. We propose an extensible and modular language that allows the human expert to compactly represent complex search spaces over architectures and their hyperparameters. The resulting search spaces are tree-structured and therefore easy to traverse. Models can be automatically compiled to computational graphs once values for all hyperparameters have been chosen. We can leverage the structure of the search space to introduce different model search algorithms, such as random search, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), and sequential model-based optimization (SMBO). We present experiments comparing the different algorithms on CIFAR-10 and show that MCTS and SMBO outperform random search. In addition, these experiments show that our framework can be used effectively for model discovery, as it is possible to describe expressive search spaces and discover competitive models without much effort from the human expert. Code for our framework and experiments has been made publicly available.
FaceID-6M: A Large-Scale, Open-Source FaceID Customization Dataset
Due to the data-driven nature of current face identity (FaceID) customization methods, all state-of-the-art models rely on large-scale datasets containing millions of high-quality text-image pairs for training. However, none of these datasets are publicly available, which restricts transparency and hinders further advancements in the field. To address this issue, in this paper, we collect and release FaceID-6M, the first large-scale, open-source FaceID dataset containing 6 million high-quality text-image pairs. Filtered from LAION-5B schuhmann2022laion, FaceID-6M undergoes a rigorous image and text filtering steps to ensure dataset quality, including resolution filtering to maintain high-quality images and faces, face filtering to remove images that lack human faces, and keyword-based strategy to retain descriptions containing human-related terms (e.g., nationality, professions and names). Through these cleaning processes, FaceID-6M provides a high-quality dataset optimized for training powerful FaceID customization models, facilitating advancements in the field by offering an open resource for research and development. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our FaceID-6M, demonstrating that models trained on our FaceID-6M dataset achieve performance that is comparable to, and slightly better than currently available industrial models. Additionally, to support and advance research in the FaceID customization community, we make our code, datasets, and models fully publicly available. Our codes, models, and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuheSH/FaceID-6M.
DISCO-10M: A Large-Scale Music Dataset
Music datasets play a crucial role in advancing research in machine learning for music. However, existing music datasets suffer from limited size, accessibility, and lack of audio resources. To address these shortcomings, we present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset by an order of magnitude. To ensure high-quality data, we implement a multi-stage filtering process. This process incorporates similarities based on textual descriptions and audio embeddings. Moreover, we provide precomputed CLAP embeddings alongside DISCO-10M, facilitating direct application on various downstream tasks. These embeddings enable efficient exploration of machine learning applications on the provided data. With DISCO-10M, we aim to democratize and facilitate new research to help advance the development of novel machine learning models for music.
AutoTransfer: AutoML with Knowledge Transfer -- An Application to Graph Neural Networks
AutoML has demonstrated remarkable success in finding an effective neural architecture for a given machine learning task defined by a specific dataset and an evaluation metric. However, most present AutoML techniques consider each task independently from scratch, which requires exploring many architectures, leading to high computational cost. Here we propose AutoTransfer, an AutoML solution that improves search efficiency by transferring the prior architectural design knowledge to the novel task of interest. Our key innovation includes a task-model bank that captures the model performance over a diverse set of GNN architectures and tasks, and a computationally efficient task embedding that can accurately measure the similarity among different tasks. Based on the task-model bank and the task embeddings, we estimate the design priors of desirable models of the novel task, by aggregating a similarity-weighted sum of the top-K design distributions on tasks that are similar to the task of interest. The computed design priors can be used with any AutoML search algorithm. We evaluate AutoTransfer on six datasets in the graph machine learning domain. Experiments demonstrate that (i) our proposed task embedding can be computed efficiently, and that tasks with similar embeddings have similar best-performing architectures; (ii) AutoTransfer significantly improves search efficiency with the transferred design priors, reducing the number of explored architectures by an order of magnitude. Finally, we release GNN-Bank-101, a large-scale dataset of detailed GNN training information of 120,000 task-model combinations to facilitate and inspire future research.
AART: AI-Assisted Red-Teaming with Diverse Data Generation for New LLM-powered Applications
Adversarial testing of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their safe and responsible deployment. We introduce a novel approach for automated generation of adversarial evaluation datasets to test the safety of LLM generations on new downstream applications. We call it AI-assisted Red-Teaming (AART) - an automated alternative to current manual red-teaming efforts. AART offers a data generation and augmentation pipeline of reusable and customizable recipes that reduce human effort significantly and enable integration of adversarial testing earlier in new product development. AART generates evaluation datasets with high diversity of content characteristics critical for effective adversarial testing (e.g. sensitive and harmful concepts, specific to a wide range of cultural and geographic regions and application scenarios). The data generation is steered by AI-assisted recipes to define, scope and prioritize diversity within the application context. This feeds into a structured LLM-generation process that scales up evaluation priorities. Compared to some state-of-the-art tools, AART shows promising results in terms of concept coverage and data quality.
ACL-Fig: A Dataset for Scientific Figure Classification
Most existing large-scale academic search engines are built to retrieve text-based information. However, there are no large-scale retrieval services for scientific figures and tables. One challenge for such services is understanding scientific figures' semantics, such as their types and purposes. A key obstacle is the need for datasets containing annotated scientific figures and tables, which can then be used for classification, question-answering, and auto-captioning. Here, we develop a pipeline that extracts figures and tables from the scientific literature and a deep-learning-based framework that classifies scientific figures using visual features. Using this pipeline, we built the first large-scale automatically annotated corpus, ACL-Fig, consisting of 112,052 scientific figures extracted from ~56K research papers in the ACL Anthology. The ACL-Fig-Pilot dataset contains 1,671 manually labeled scientific figures belonging to 19 categories. The dataset is accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/citeseerx/ACL-fig under a CC BY-NC license.
Improving Classifier Training Efficiency for Automatic Cyberbullying Detection with Feature Density
We study the effectiveness of Feature Density (FD) using different linguistically-backed feature preprocessing methods in order to estimate dataset complexity, which in turn is used to comparatively estimate the potential performance of machine learning (ML) classifiers prior to any training. We hypothesise that estimating dataset complexity allows for the reduction of the number of required experiments iterations. This way we can optimize the resource-intensive training of ML models which is becoming a serious issue due to the increases in available dataset sizes and the ever rising popularity of models based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The problem of constantly increasing needs for more powerful computational resources is also affecting the environment due to alarmingly-growing amount of CO2 emissions caused by training of large-scale ML models. The research was conducted on multiple datasets, including popular datasets, such as Yelp business review dataset used for training typical sentiment analysis models, as well as more recent datasets trying to tackle the problem of cyberbullying, which, being a serious social problem, is also a much more sophisticated problem form the point of view of linguistic representation. We use cyberbullying datasets collected for multiple languages, namely English, Japanese and Polish. The difference in linguistic complexity of datasets allows us to additionally discuss the efficacy of linguistically-backed word preprocessing.
WildAvatar: Web-scale In-the-wild Video Dataset for 3D Avatar Creation
Existing human datasets for avatar creation are typically limited to laboratory environments, wherein high-quality annotations (e.g., SMPL estimation from 3D scans or multi-view images) can be ideally provided. However, their annotating requirements are impractical for real-world images or videos, posing challenges toward real-world applications on current avatar creation methods. To this end, we propose the WildAvatar dataset, a web-scale in-the-wild human avatar creation dataset extracted from YouTube, with 10,000+ different human subjects and scenes. WildAvatar is at least 10times richer than previous datasets for 3D human avatar creation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art avatar creation methods on our dataset, highlighting the unexplored challenges in real-world applications on avatar creation. We also demonstrate the potential for generalizability of avatar creation methods, when provided with data at scale. We publicly release our data source links and annotations, to push forward 3D human avatar creation and other related fields for real-world applications.
Exploring the Potential of AI-Generated Synthetic Datasets: A Case Study on Telematics Data with ChatGPT
This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.
KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D
For the last few decades, several major subfields of artificial intelligence including computer vision, graphics, and robotics have progressed largely independently from each other. Recently, however, the community has realized that progress towards robust intelligent systems such as self-driving cars requires a concerted effort across the different fields. This motivated us to develop KITTI-360, successor of the popular KITTI dataset. KITTI-360 is a suburban driving dataset which comprises richer input modalities, comprehensive semantic instance annotations and accurate localization to facilitate research at the intersection of vision, graphics and robotics. For efficient annotation, we created a tool to label 3D scenes with bounding primitives and developed a model that transfers this information into the 2D image domain, resulting in over 150k images and 1B 3D points with coherent semantic instance annotations across 2D and 3D. Moreover, we established benchmarks and baselines for several tasks relevant to mobile perception, encompassing problems from computer vision, graphics, and robotics on the same dataset, e.g., semantic scene understanding, novel view synthesis and semantic SLAM. KITTI-360 will enable progress at the intersection of these research areas and thus contribute towards solving one of today's grand challenges: the development of fully autonomous self-driving systems.
Reinforce Data, Multiply Impact: Improved Model Accuracy and Robustness with Dataset Reinforcement
We propose Dataset Reinforcement, a strategy to improve a dataset once such that the accuracy of any model architecture trained on the reinforced dataset is improved at no additional training cost for users. We propose a Dataset Reinforcement strategy based on data augmentation and knowledge distillation. Our generic strategy is designed based on extensive analysis across CNN- and transformer-based models and performing large-scale study of distillation with state-of-the-art models with various data augmentations. We create a reinforced version of the ImageNet training dataset, called ImageNet+, as well as reinforced datasets CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+. Models trained with ImageNet+ are more accurate, robust, and calibrated, and transfer well to downstream tasks (e.g., segmentation and detection). As an example, the accuracy of ResNet-50 improves by 1.7% on the ImageNet validation set, 3.5% on ImageNetV2, and 10.0% on ImageNet-R. Expected Calibration Error (ECE) on the ImageNet validation set is also reduced by 9.9%. Using this backbone with Mask-RCNN for object detection on MS-COCO, the mean average precision improves by 0.8%. We reach similar gains for MobileNets, ViTs, and Swin-Transformers. For MobileNetV3 and Swin-Tiny we observe significant improvements on ImageNet-R/A/C of up to 10% improved robustness. Models pretrained on ImageNet+ and fine-tuned on CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+, reach up to 3.4% improved accuracy.
CAME: Contrastive Automated Model Evaluation
The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) framework entertains the possibility of evaluating a trained machine learning model without resorting to a labeled testing set. Despite the promise and some decent results, the existing AutoEval methods heavily rely on computing distribution shifts between the unlabelled testing set and the training set. We believe this reliance on the training set becomes another obstacle in shipping this technology to real-world ML development. In this work, we propose Contrastive Automatic Model Evaluation (CAME), a novel AutoEval framework that is rid of involving training set in the loop. The core idea of CAME bases on a theoretical analysis which bonds the model performance with a contrastive loss. Further, with extensive empirical validation, we manage to set up a predictable relationship between the two, simply by deducing on the unlabeled/unseen testing set. The resulting framework CAME establishes a new SOTA results for AutoEval by surpassing prior work significantly.
Relational Deep Learning: Graph Representation Learning on Relational Databases
Much of the world's most valued data is stored in relational databases and data warehouses, where the data is organized into many tables connected by primary-foreign key relations. However, building machine learning models using this data is both challenging and time consuming. The core problem is that no machine learning method is capable of learning on multiple tables interconnected by primary-foreign key relations. Current methods can only learn from a single table, so the data must first be manually joined and aggregated into a single training table, the process known as feature engineering. Feature engineering is slow, error prone and leads to suboptimal models. Here we introduce an end-to-end deep representation learning approach to directly learn on data laid out across multiple tables. We name our approach Relational Deep Learning (RDL). The core idea is to view relational databases as a temporal, heterogeneous graph, with a node for each row in each table, and edges specified by primary-foreign key links. Message Passing Graph Neural Networks can then automatically learn across the graph to extract representations that leverage all input data, without any manual feature engineering. Relational Deep Learning leads to more accurate models that can be built much faster. To facilitate research in this area, we develop RelBench, a set of benchmark datasets and an implementation of Relational Deep Learning. The data covers a wide spectrum, from discussions on Stack Exchange to book reviews on the Amazon Product Catalog. Overall, we define a new research area that generalizes graph machine learning and broadens its applicability to a wide set of AI use cases.
ChessVision -- A Dataset for Logically Coherent Multi-label Classification
Starting with early successes in computer vision tasks, deep learning based techniques have since overtaken state of the art approaches in a multitude of domains. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that these techniques fail to capture semantic context and logical constraints, instead often relying on spurious correlations to arrive at the answer. Since application of deep learning techniques to critical scenarios are dependent on adherence to domain specific constraints, several attempts have been made to address this issue. One limitation holding back a thorough exploration of this area, is a lack of suitable datasets which feature a rich set of rules. In order to address this, we present the ChessVision Dataset, consisting of 200,000+ images of annotated chess games in progress, requiring recreation of the game state from its corresponding image. This is accompanied by a curated set of rules which constrains the set of predictions to "reasonable" game states, and are designed to probe key semantic abilities like localization and enumeration. Alongside standard metrics, additional metrics to measure performance with regards to logical consistency is presented. We analyze several popular and state of the art vision models on this task, and show that, although their performance on standard metrics are laudable, they produce a plethora of incoherent results, indicating that this dataset presents a significant challenge for future works.
AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification
Aerial scene classification, which aims to automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category, is a fundamental problem for understanding high-resolution remote sensing imagery. In recent years, it has become an active task in remote sensing area and numerous algorithms have been proposed for this task, including many machine learning and data-driven approaches. However, the existing datasets for aerial scene classification like UC-Merced dataset and WHU-RS19 are with relatively small sizes, and the results on them are already saturated. This largely limits the development of scene classification algorithms. This paper describes the Aerial Image Dataset (AID): a large-scale dataset for aerial scene classification. The goal of AID is to advance the state-of-the-arts in scene classification of remote sensing images. For creating AID, we collect and annotate more than ten thousands aerial scene images. In addition, a comprehensive review of the existing aerial scene classification techniques as well as recent widely-used deep learning methods is given. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of typical aerial scene classification and deep learning approaches on AID, which can be served as the baseline results on this benchmark.
DEArt: Dataset of European Art
Large datasets that were made publicly available to the research community over the last 20 years have been a key enabling factor for the advances in deep learning algorithms for NLP or computer vision. These datasets are generally pairs of aligned image / manually annotated metadata, where images are photographs of everyday life. Scholarly and historical content, on the other hand, treat subjects that are not necessarily popular to a general audience, they may not always contain a large number of data points, and new data may be difficult or impossible to collect. Some exceptions do exist, for instance, scientific or health data, but this is not the case for cultural heritage (CH). The poor performance of the best models in computer vision - when tested over artworks - coupled with the lack of extensively annotated datasets for CH, and the fact that artwork images depict objects and actions not captured by photographs, indicate that a CH-specific dataset would be highly valuable for this community. We propose DEArt, at this point primarily an object detection and pose classification dataset meant to be a reference for paintings between the XIIth and the XVIIIth centuries. It contains more than 15000 images, about 80% non-iconic, aligned with manual annotations for the bounding boxes identifying all instances of 69 classes as well as 12 possible poses for boxes identifying human-like objects. Of these, more than 50 classes are CH-specific and thus do not appear in other datasets; these reflect imaginary beings, symbolic entities and other categories related to art. Additionally, existing datasets do not include pose annotations. Our results show that object detectors for the cultural heritage domain can achieve a level of precision comparable to state-of-art models for generic images via transfer learning.
Revisiting Table Detection Datasets for Visually Rich Documents
Table Detection has become a fundamental task for visually rich document understanding with the surging number of electronic documents. However, popular public datasets widely used in related studies have inherent limitations, including noisy and inconsistent samples, limited training samples, and limited data sources. These limitations make these datasets unreliable to evaluate the model performance and cannot reflect the actual capacity of models. Therefore, this study revisits some open datasets with high-quality annotations, identifies and cleans the noise, and aligns the annotation definitions of these datasets to merge a larger dataset, termed Open-Tables. Moreover, to enrich the data sources, we propose a new ICT-TD dataset using the PDF files of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) commodities, a different domain containing unique samples that hardly appear in open datasets. To ensure the label quality of the dataset, we annotated the dataset manually following the guidance of a domain expert. The proposed dataset is challenging and can be a sample of actual cases in the business context. We built strong baselines using various state-of-the-art object detection models. Our experimental results show that the domain differences among existing open datasets are minor despite having different data sources. Our proposed Open-Tables and ICT-TD can provide a more reliable evaluation for models because of their high quality and consistent annotations. Besides, they are more suitable for cross-domain settings. Our experimental results show that in the cross-domain setting, benchmark models trained with cleaned Open-Tables dataset can achieve 0.6\%-2.6\% higher weighted average F1 than the corresponding ones trained with the noisy version of Open-Tables, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed datasets. The datasets are public available.
Kvasir-VQA: A Text-Image Pair GI Tract Dataset
We introduce Kvasir-VQA, an extended dataset derived from the HyperKvasir and Kvasir-Instrument datasets, augmented with question-and-answer annotations to facilitate advanced machine learning tasks in Gastrointestinal (GI) diagnostics. This dataset comprises 6,500 annotated images spanning various GI tract conditions and surgical instruments, and it supports multiple question types including yes/no, choice, location, and numerical count. The dataset is intended for applications such as image captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), text-based generation of synthetic medical images, object detection, and classification. Our experiments demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness in training models for three selected tasks, showcasing significant applications in medical image analysis and diagnostics. We also present evaluation metrics for each task, highlighting the usability and versatility of our dataset. The dataset and supporting artifacts are available at https://datasets.simula.no/kvasir-vqa.
unarXive 2022: All arXiv Publications Pre-Processed for NLP, Including Structured Full-Text and Citation Network
Large-scale data sets on scholarly publications are the basis for a variety of bibliometric analyses and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Especially data sets derived from publication's full-text have recently gained attention. While several such data sets already exist, we see key shortcomings in terms of their domain and time coverage, citation network completeness, and representation of full-text content. To address these points, we propose a new version of the data set unarXive. We base our data processing pipeline and output format on two existing data sets, and improve on each of them. Our resulting data set comprises 1.9 M publications spanning multiple disciplines and 32 years. It furthermore has a more complete citation network than its predecessors and retains a richer representation of document structure as well as non-textual publication content such as mathematical notation. In addition to the data set, we provide ready-to-use training/test data for citation recommendation and IMRaD classification. All data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/unarXive.
SolarDK: A high-resolution urban solar panel image classification and localization dataset
The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works. Furthermore, we train models of newer architectures and provide benchmark baselines to our datasets in several scenarios. We believe the release of these datasets may improve future research in both local and global geospatial domains for identifying and mapping of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery. The data is accessible at https://osf.io/aj539/.
Autoencoder-based General Purpose Representation Learning for Customer Embedding
In recent years, exploiting the domain-specific underlying structure of data and its generative factors for representation learning has shown success in various use-case agnostic applications. However, the diversity and complexity of tabular data have made it challenging to represent these structures in a latent space through multi-dimensional vectors. We design an autoencoder-based framework for building general purpose embeddings, we assess the performance of different autoencoder architectures, and show simpler models outperform complex ones in embedding highly complex tabular data. We apply our framework to produce plug-and-play, rich, and anonymized embeddings representing AWS customers for usage in any model, saving up to 45% of development time, and observe significant improvements in downstream models. Moreover, we propose a significant improvement to the calculation of reconstruction loss for multi-layer contractive autoencoders (CAE) by calculating the Jacobian of the entire encoder leading to a 15% improvement in reconstruction quality when compared to a stacked CAE.
EARS: An Anechoic Fullband Speech Dataset Benchmarked for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation
We release the EARS (Expressive Anechoic Recordings of Speech) dataset, a high-quality speech dataset comprising 107 speakers from diverse backgrounds, totaling in 100 hours of clean, anechoic speech data. The dataset covers a large range of different speaking styles, including emotional speech, different reading styles, non-verbal sounds, and conversational freeform speech. We benchmark various methods for speech enhancement and dereverberation on the dataset and evaluate their performance through a set of instrumental metrics. In addition, we conduct a listening test with 20 participants for the speech enhancement task, where a generative method is preferred. We introduce a blind test set that allows for automatic online evaluation of uploaded data. Dataset download links and automatic evaluation server can be found online.
Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
The recent breakthrough successes in machine learning are mainly attributed to scale: namely large-scale attention-based architectures and datasets of unprecedented scale. This paper investigates the impact of training at scale for chess. Unlike traditional chess engines that rely on complex heuristics, explicit search, or a combination of both, we train a 270M parameter transformer model with supervised learning on a dataset of 10 million chess games. We annotate each board in the dataset with action-values provided by the powerful Stockfish 16 engine, leading to roughly 15 billion data points. Our largest model reaches a Lichess blitz Elo of 2895 against humans, and successfully solves a series of challenging chess puzzles, without any domain-specific tweaks or explicit search algorithms. We also show that our model outperforms AlphaZero's policy and value networks (without MCTS) and GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct. A systematic investigation of model and dataset size shows that strong chess performance only arises at sufficient scale. To validate our results, we perform an extensive series of ablations of design choices and hyperparameters.
Accident Risk Prediction based on Heterogeneous Sparse Data: New Dataset and Insights
Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge, therefore, accident analysis and prediction has been a topic of much research over the past few decades. Using small-scale datasets with limited coverage, being dependent on extensive set of data, and being not applicable for real-time purposes are the important shortcomings of the existing studies. To address these challenges, we propose a new solution for real-time traffic accident prediction using easy-to-obtain, but sparse data. Our solution relies on a deep-neural-network model (which we have named DAP, for Deep Accident Prediction); which utilizes a variety of data attributes such as traffic events, weather data, points-of-interest, and time. DAP incorporates multiple components including a recurrent (for time-sensitive data), a fully connected (for time-insensitive data), and a trainable embedding component (to capture spatial heterogeneity). To fill the data gap, we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. By employing the US-Accidents dataset and through an extensive set of experiments across several large cities, we have evaluated our proposal against several baselines. Our analysis and results show significant improvements to predict rare accident events. Further, we have shown the impact of traffic information, time, and points-of-interest data for real-time accident prediction.
Automated Machine Learning: State-of-The-Art and Open Challenges
With the continuous and vast increase in the amount of data in our digital world, it has been acknowledged that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale to address these challenges. Thus, there was a crucial need for automating the process of building good machine learning models. In the last few years, several techniques and frameworks have been introduced to tackle the challenge of automating the process of Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyper-parameter tuning (CASH) in the machine learning domain. The main aim of these techniques is to reduce the role of the human in the loop and fill the gap for non-expert machine learning users by playing the role of the domain expert. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey for the state-of-the-art efforts in tackling the CASH problem. In addition, we highlight the research work of automating the other steps of the full complex machine learning pipeline (AutoML) from data understanding till model deployment. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive coverage for the various tools and frameworks that have been introduced in this domain. Finally, we discuss some of the research directions and open challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the vision and goals of the AutoML process.
Sample-Efficient Automated Deep Reinforcement Learning
Despite significant progress in challenging problems across various domains, applying state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms remains challenging due to their sensitivity to the choice of hyperparameters. This sensitivity can partly be attributed to the non-stationarity of the RL problem, potentially requiring different hyperparameter settings at various stages of the learning process. Additionally, in the RL setting, hyperparameter optimization (HPO) requires a large number of environment interactions, hindering the transfer of the successes in RL to real-world applications. In this work, we tackle the issues of sample-efficient and dynamic HPO in RL. We propose a population-based automated RL (AutoRL) framework to meta-optimize arbitrary off-policy RL algorithms. In this framework, we optimize the hyperparameters and also the neural architecture while simultaneously training the agent. By sharing the collected experience across the population, we substantially increase the sample efficiency of the meta-optimization. We demonstrate the capabilities of our sample-efficient AutoRL approach in a case study with the popular TD3 algorithm in the MuJoCo benchmark suite, where we reduce the number of environment interactions needed for meta-optimization by up to an order of magnitude compared to population-based training.
A Multilingual Translator to SQL with Database Schema Pruning to Improve Self-Attention
Long sequences of text are challenging in the context of transformers, due to quadratic memory increase in the self-attention mechanism. As this issue directly affects the translation from natural language to SQL queries (as techniques usually take as input a concatenated text with the question and the database schema), we present techniques that allow long text sequences to be handled by transformers with up to 512 input tokens. We propose a training process with database schema pruning (removal of tables and columns names that are useless for the query of interest). In addition, we used a multilingual approach with the mT5-large model fine-tuned with a data-augmented Spider dataset in four languages simultaneously: English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Our proposed technique used the Spider dataset and increased the exact set match accuracy results from 0.718 to 0.736 in a validation dataset (Dev). Source code, evaluations, and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/C4AI/gap-text2sql.
BigBIO: A Framework for Data-Centric Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical
AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment
With the rapid advancements in AI-Generated Content (AIGC), AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) have been widely applied in entertainment, education, and social media. However, due to the significant variance in quality among different AIGIs, there is an urgent need for models that consistently match human subjective ratings. To address this issue, we organized a challenge towards AIGC quality assessment on NTIRE 2024 that extensively considers 15 popular generative models, utilizing dynamic hyper-parameters (including classifier-free guidance, iteration epochs, and output image resolution), and gather subjective scores that consider perceptual quality and text-to-image alignment altogether comprehensively involving 21 subjects. This approach culminates in the creation of the largest fine-grained AIGI subjective quality database to date with 20,000 AIGIs and 420,000 subjective ratings, known as AIGIQA-20K. Furthermore, we conduct benchmark experiments on this database to assess the correspondence between 16 mainstream AIGI quality models and human perception. We anticipate that this large-scale quality database will inspire robust quality indicators for AIGIs and propel the evolution of AIGC for vision. The database is released on https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/lcysyzxdxc/AIGCQA-30K-Image.
Robust Hate Speech Detection in Social Media: A Cross-Dataset Empirical Evaluation
The automatic detection of hate speech online is an active research area in NLP. Most of the studies to date are based on social media datasets that contribute to the creation of hate speech detection models trained on them. However, data creation processes contain their own biases, and models inherently learn from these dataset-specific biases. In this paper, we perform a large-scale cross-dataset comparison where we fine-tune language models on different hate speech detection datasets. This analysis shows how some datasets are more generalisable than others when used as training data. Crucially, our experiments show how combining hate speech detection datasets can contribute to the development of robust hate speech detection models. This robustness holds even when controlling by data size and compared with the best individual datasets.
Archer: A Human-Labeled Text-to-SQL Dataset with Arithmetic, Commonsense and Hypothetical Reasoning
We present Archer, a challenging bilingual text-to-SQL dataset specific to complex reasoning, including arithmetic, commonsense and hypothetical reasoning. It contains 1,042 English questions and 1,042 Chinese questions, along with 521 unique SQL queries, covering 20 English databases across 20 domains. Notably, this dataset demonstrates a significantly higher level of complexity compared to existing publicly available datasets. Our evaluation shows that Archer challenges the capabilities of current state-of-the-art models, with a high-ranked model on the Spider leaderboard achieving only 6.73% execution accuracy on Archer test set. Thus, Archer presents a significant challenge for future research in this field.
Unified Functional Hashing in Automatic Machine Learning
The field of Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) has recently attained impressive results, including the discovery of state-of-the-art machine learning solutions, such as neural image classifiers. This is often done by applying an evolutionary search method, which samples multiple candidate solutions from a large space and evaluates the quality of each candidate through a long training process. As a result, the search tends to be slow. In this paper, we show that large efficiency gains can be obtained by employing a fast unified functional hash, especially through the functional equivalence caching technique, which we also present. The central idea is to detect by hashing when the search method produces equivalent candidates, which occurs very frequently, and this way avoid their costly re-evaluation. Our hash is "functional" in that it identifies equivalent candidates even if they were represented or coded differently, and it is "unified" in that the same algorithm can hash arbitrary representations; e.g. compute graphs, imperative code, or lambda functions. As evidence, we show dramatic improvements on multiple AutoML domains, including neural architecture search and algorithm discovery. Finally, we consider the effect of hash collisions, evaluation noise, and search distribution through empirical analysis. Altogether, we hope this paper may serve as a guide to hashing techniques in AutoML.
RU-AI: A Large Multimodal Dataset for Machine Generated Content Detection
The recent advancements in generative AI models, which can create realistic and human-like content, are significantly transforming how people communicate, create, and work. While the appropriate use of generative AI models can benefit the society, their misuse poses significant threats to data reliability and authentication. However, due to a lack of aligned multimodal datasets, effective and robust methods for detecting machine-generated content are still in the early stages of development. In this paper, we introduce RU-AI, a new large-scale multimodal dataset designed for the robust and efficient detection of machine-generated content in text, image, and voice. Our dataset is constructed from three large publicly available datasets: Flickr8K, COCO, and Places205, by combining the original datasets and their corresponding machine-generated pairs. Additionally, experimental results show that our proposed unified model, which incorporates a multimodal embedding module with a multilayer perceptron network, can effectively determine the origin of the data (i.e., original data samples or machine-generated ones) from RU-AI. However, future work is still required to address the remaining challenges posed by RU-AI. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhihaoZhang97/RU-AI.
Data Filtering Networks
Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then filter this candidate pool down to an actual training set via various heuristics. In this work, we study the problem of learning a data filtering network (DFN) for this second step of filtering a large uncurated dataset. Our key finding is that the quality of a network for filtering is distinct from its performance on downstream tasks: for instance, a model that performs well on ImageNet can yield worse training sets than a model with low ImageNet accuracy that is trained on a small amount of high-quality data. Based on our insights, we construct new data filtering networks that induce state-of-the-art image-text datasets. Specifically, our best performing dataset DFN-5B enables us to train state-of-the-art models for their compute budgets: among other improvements on a variety of tasks, a ViT-H trained on our dataset achieves 83.0% zero-shot transfer accuracy on ImageNet, out-performing models trained on other datasets such as LAION-2B, DataComp-1B, or OpenAI's WIT. In order to facilitate further research in dataset design, we also release a new 2 billion example dataset DFN-2B and show that high performance data filtering networks can be trained from scratch using only publicly available data.
G1020: A Benchmark Retinal Fundus Image Dataset for Computer-Aided Glaucoma Detection
Scarcity of large publicly available retinal fundus image datasets for automated glaucoma detection has been the bottleneck for successful application of artificial intelligence towards practical Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD). A few small datasets that are available for research community usually suffer from impractical image capturing conditions and stringent inclusion criteria. These shortcomings in already limited choice of existing datasets make it challenging to mature a CAD system so that it can perform in real-world environment. In this paper we present a large publicly available retinal fundus image dataset for glaucoma classification called G1020. The dataset is curated by conforming to standard practices in routine ophthalmology and it is expected to serve as standard benchmark dataset for glaucoma detection. This database consists of 1020 high resolution colour fundus images and provides ground truth annotations for glaucoma diagnosis, optic disc and optic cup segmentation, vertical cup-to-disc ratio, size of neuroretinal rim in inferior, superior, nasal and temporal quadrants, and bounding box location for optic disc. We also report baseline results by conducting extensive experiments for automated glaucoma diagnosis and segmentation of optic disc and optic cup.
FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset
The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.
GMAI-VL & GMAI-VL-5.5M: A Large Vision-Language Model and A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset Towards General Medical AI
Despite significant advancements in general artificial intelligence, such as GPT-4, their effectiveness in the medical domain (general medical AI, GMAI) remains constrained due to the absence of specialized medical knowledge. To address this challenge, we present GMAI-VL-5.5M, a comprehensive multimodal medical dataset created by converting hundreds of specialized medical datasets into meticulously constructed image-text pairs. This dataset features comprehensive task coverage, diverse modalities, and high-quality image-text data. Building upon this multimodal dataset, we propose GMAI-VL, a general medical vision-language model with a progressively three-stage training strategy. This approach significantly enhances the model's ability by integrating visual and textual information, thereby improving its ability to process multimodal data and support accurate diagnosis and clinical decision-making. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that GMAI-VL achieves state-of-the-art results across a wide range of multimodal medical tasks, such as visual question answering and medical image diagnosis. Our contributions include the development of the GMAI-VL-5.5M dataset, the introduction of the GMAI-VL model, and the establishment of new benchmarks in multiple medical domains. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/uni-medical/GMAI-VL.
Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are predominantly evaluated by comparing their relative performance on a large suite of tasks. Most published results on deep RL benchmarks compare point estimates of aggregate performance such as mean and median scores across tasks, ignoring the statistical uncertainty implied by the use of a finite number of training runs. Beginning with the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), the shift towards computationally-demanding benchmarks has led to the practice of evaluating only a small number of runs per task, exacerbating the statistical uncertainty in point estimates. In this paper, we argue that reliable evaluation in the few run deep RL regime cannot ignore the uncertainty in results without running the risk of slowing down progress in the field. We illustrate this point using a case study on the Atari 100k benchmark, where we find substantial discrepancies between conclusions drawn from point estimates alone versus a more thorough statistical analysis. With the aim of increasing the field's confidence in reported results with a handful of runs, we advocate for reporting interval estimates of aggregate performance and propose performance profiles to account for the variability in results, as well as present more robust and efficient aggregate metrics, such as interquartile mean scores, to achieve small uncertainty in results. Using such statistical tools, we scrutinize performance evaluations of existing algorithms on other widely used RL benchmarks including the ALE, Procgen, and the DeepMind Control Suite, again revealing discrepancies in prior comparisons. Our findings call for a change in how we evaluate performance in deep RL, for which we present a more rigorous evaluation methodology, accompanied with an open-source library rliable, to prevent unreliable results from stagnating the field.
PokéChamp: an Expert-level Minimax Language Agent
We introduce Pok\'eChamp, a minimax agent powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) for Pok\'emon battles. Built on a general framework for two-player competitive games, Pok\'eChamp leverages the generalist capabilities of LLMs to enhance minimax tree search. Specifically, LLMs replace three key modules: (1) player action sampling, (2) opponent modeling, and (3) value function estimation, enabling the agent to effectively utilize gameplay history and human knowledge to reduce the search space and address partial observability. Notably, our framework requires no additional LLM training. We evaluate Pok\'eChamp in the popular Gen 9 OU format. When powered by GPT-4o, it achieves a win rate of 76% against the best existing LLM-based bot and 84% against the strongest rule-based bot, demonstrating its superior performance. Even with an open-source 8-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 model, Pok\'eChamp consistently outperforms the previous best LLM-based bot, Pok\'ellmon powered by GPT-4o, with a 64% win rate. Pok\'eChamp attains a projected Elo of 1300-1500 on the Pok\'emon Showdown online ladder, placing it among the top 30%-10% of human players. In addition, this work compiles the largest real-player Pok\'emon battle dataset, featuring over 3 million games, including more than 500k high-Elo matches. Based on this dataset, we establish a series of battle benchmarks and puzzles to evaluate specific battling skills. We further provide key updates to the local game engine. We hope this work fosters further research that leverage Pok\'emon battle as benchmark to integrate LLM technologies with game-theoretic algorithms addressing general multiagent problems. Videos, code, and dataset available at https://sites.google.com/view/pokechamp-llm.
A Multi-purpose Realistic Haze Benchmark with Quantifiable Haze Levels and Ground Truth
Imagery collected from outdoor visual environments is often degraded due to the presence of dense smoke or haze. A key challenge for research in scene understanding in these degraded visual environments (DVE) is the lack of representative benchmark datasets. These datasets are required to evaluate state-of-the-art vision algorithms (e.g., detection and tracking) in degraded settings. In this paper, we address some of these limitations by introducing the first realistic hazy image benchmark, from both aerial and ground view, with paired haze-free images, and in-situ haze density measurements. This dataset was produced in a controlled environment with professional smoke generating machines that covered the entire scene, and consists of images captured from the perspective of both an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). We also evaluate a set of representative state-of-the-art dehazing approaches as well as object detectors on the dataset. The full dataset presented in this paper, including the ground truth object classification bounding boxes and haze density measurements, is provided for the community to evaluate their algorithms at: https://a2i2-archangel.vision. A subset of this dataset has been used for the ``Object Detection in Haze'' Track of CVPR UG2 2022 challenge at http://cvpr2022.ug2challenge.org/track1.html.
HashSet -- A Dataset For Hashtag Segmentation
Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways -- transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task -- STAN, BOUN -- are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.
Efficient Model Adaptation for Continual Learning at the Edge
Most machine learning (ML) systems assume stationary and matching data distributions during training and deployment. This is often a false assumption. When ML models are deployed on real devices, data distributions often shift over time due to changes in environmental factors, sensor characteristics, and task-of-interest. While it is possible to have a human-in-the-loop to monitor for distribution shifts and engineer new architectures in response to these shifts, such a setup is not cost-effective. Instead, non-stationary automated ML (AutoML) models are needed. This paper presents the Encoder-Adaptor-Reconfigurator (EAR) framework for efficient continual learning under domain shifts. The EAR framework uses a fixed deep neural network (DNN) feature encoder and trains shallow networks on top of the encoder to handle novel data. The EAR framework is capable of 1) detecting when new data is out-of-distribution (OOD) by combining DNNs with hyperdimensional computing (HDC), 2) identifying low-parameter neural adaptors to adapt the model to the OOD data using zero-shot neural architecture search (ZS-NAS), and 3) minimizing catastrophic forgetting on previous tasks by progressively growing the neural architecture as needed and dynamically routing data through the appropriate adaptors and reconfigurators for handling domain-incremental and class-incremental continual learning. We systematically evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets for domain adaptation and demonstrate strong performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for OOD detection and few-/zero-shot NAS.
MetaShift: A Dataset of Datasets for Evaluating Contextual Distribution Shifts and Training Conflicts
Understanding the performance of machine learning models across diverse data distributions is critically important for reliable applications. Motivated by this, there is a growing focus on curating benchmark datasets that capture distribution shifts. While valuable, the existing benchmarks are limited in that many of them only contain a small number of shifts and they lack systematic annotation about what is different across different shifts. We present MetaShift--a collection of 12,868 sets of natural images across 410 classes--to address this challenge. We leverage the natural heterogeneity of Visual Genome and its annotations to construct MetaShift. The key construction idea is to cluster images using its metadata, which provides context for each image (e.g. "cats with cars" or "cats in bathroom") that represent distinct data distributions. MetaShift has two important benefits: first, it contains orders of magnitude more natural data shifts than previously available. Second, it provides explicit explanations of what is unique about each of its data sets and a distance score that measures the amount of distribution shift between any two of its data sets. We demonstrate the utility of MetaShift in benchmarking several recent proposals for training models to be robust to data shifts. We find that the simple empirical risk minimization performs the best when shifts are moderate and no method had a systematic advantage for large shifts. We also show how MetaShift can help to visualize conflicts between data subsets during model training.
Data Cards: Purposeful and Transparent Dataset Documentation for Responsible AI
As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.
Deep Learning based Computer Vision Methods for Complex Traffic Environments Perception: A Review
Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive literature review on the applications of computer vision in ITS and AD, and discusses challenges related to data, models, and complex urban environments. The data challenges are associated with the collection and labeling of training data and its relevance to real world conditions, bias inherent in datasets, the high volume of data needed to be processed, and privacy concerns. Deep learning (DL) models are commonly too complex for real-time processing on embedded hardware, lack explainability and generalizability, and are hard to test in real-world settings. Complex urban traffic environments have irregular lighting and occlusions, and surveillance cameras can be mounted at a variety of angles, gather dirt, shake in the wind, while the traffic conditions are highly heterogeneous, with violation of rules and complex interactions in crowded scenarios. Some representative applications that suffer from these problems are traffic flow estimation, congestion detection, autonomous driving perception, vehicle interaction, and edge computing for practical deployment. The possible ways of dealing with the challenges are also explored while prioritizing practical deployment.
ScaleDet: A Scalable Multi-Dataset Object Detector
Multi-dataset training provides a viable solution for exploiting heterogeneous large-scale datasets without extra annotation cost. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-dataset detector (ScaleDet) that can scale up its generalization across datasets when increasing the number of training datasets. Unlike existing multi-dataset learners that mostly rely on manual relabelling efforts or sophisticated optimizations to unify labels across datasets, we introduce a simple yet scalable formulation to derive a unified semantic label space for multi-dataset training. ScaleDet is trained by visual-textual alignment to learn the label assignment with label semantic similarities across datasets. Once trained, ScaleDet can generalize well on any given upstream and downstream datasets with seen and unseen classes. We conduct extensive experiments using LVIS, COCO, Objects365, OpenImages as upstream datasets, and 13 datasets from Object Detection in the Wild (ODinW) as downstream datasets. Our results show that ScaleDet achieves compelling strong model performance with an mAP of 50.7 on LVIS, 58.8 on COCO, 46.8 on Objects365, 76.2 on OpenImages, and 71.8 on ODinW, surpassing state-of-the-art detectors with the same backbone.
AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey
Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. Firstly, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Secondly, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.
The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation
This paper describes the E2E data, a new dataset for training end-to-end, data-driven natural language generation systems in the restaurant domain, which is ten times bigger than existing, frequently used datasets in this area. The E2E dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference texts show more lexical richness and syntactic variation, including discourse phenomena; (2) generating from this set requires content selection. As such, learning from this dataset promises more natural, varied and less template-like system utterances. We also establish a baseline on this dataset, which illustrates some of the difficulties associated with this data.
Towards Universal Image Embeddings: A Large-Scale Dataset and Challenge for Generic Image Representations
Fine-grained and instance-level recognition methods are commonly trained and evaluated on specific domains, in a model per domain scenario. Such an approach, however, is impractical in real large-scale applications. In this work, we address the problem of universal image embedding, where a single universal model is trained and used in multiple domains. First, we leverage existing domain-specific datasets to carefully construct a new large-scale public benchmark for the evaluation of universal image embeddings, with 241k query images, 1.4M index images and 2.8M training images across 8 different domains and 349k classes. We define suitable metrics, training and evaluation protocols to foster future research in this area. Second, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the new dataset, demonstrating that existing approaches and simplistic extensions lead to worse performance than an assembly of models trained for each domain separately. Finally, we conducted a public research competition on this topic, leveraging industrial datasets, which attracted the participation of more than 1k teams worldwide. This exercise generated many interesting research ideas and findings which we present in detail. Project webpage: https://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/univ_emb/
Atla Selene Mini: A General Purpose Evaluation Model
We introduce Atla Selene Mini, a state-of-the-art small language model-as-a-judge (SLMJ). Selene Mini is a general-purpose evaluator that outperforms the best SLMJs and GPT-4o-mini on overall performance across 11 out-of-distribution benchmarks, spanning absolute scoring, classification, and pairwise preference tasks. It is the highest-scoring 8B generative model on RewardBench, surpassing strong baselines like GPT-4o and specialized judges. To achieve this, we develop a principled data curation strategy that augments public datasets with synthetically generated critiques and ensures high quality through filtering and dataset ablations. We train our model on a combined direct preference optimization (DPO) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) loss, and produce a highly promptable evaluator that excels in real-world scenarios. Selene Mini shows dramatically improved zero-shot agreement with human expert evaluations on financial and medical industry datasets. It is also robust to variations in prompt format. Preliminary results indicate that Selene Mini is the top-ranking evaluator in a live, community-driven Judge Arena. We release the model weights on HuggingFace (https://hf.co/AtlaAI/Selene-1-Mini-Llama-3.1-8B) and Ollama to encourage widespread community adoption.
IAM: A Comprehensive and Large-Scale Dataset for Integrated Argument Mining Tasks
Traditionally, a debate usually requires a manual preparation process, including reading plenty of articles, selecting the claims, identifying the stances of the claims, seeking the evidence for the claims, etc. As the AI debate attracts more attention these years, it is worth exploring the methods to automate the tedious process involved in the debating system. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive and large dataset named IAM, which can be applied to a series of argument mining tasks, including claim extraction, stance classification, evidence extraction, etc. Our dataset is collected from over 1k articles related to 123 topics. Near 70k sentences in the dataset are fully annotated based on their argument properties (e.g., claims, stances, evidence, etc.). We further propose two new integrated argument mining tasks associated with the debate preparation process: (1) claim extraction with stance classification (CESC) and (2) claim-evidence pair extraction (CEPE). We adopt a pipeline approach and an end-to-end method for each integrated task separately. Promising experimental results are reported to show the values and challenges of our proposed tasks, and motivate future research on argument mining.
A Public Image Database for Benchmark of Plant Seedling Classification Algorithms
A database of images of approximately 960 unique plants belonging to 12 species at several growth stages is made publicly available. It comprises annotated RGB images with a physical resolution of roughly 10 pixels per mm. To standardise the evaluation of classification results obtained with the database, a benchmark based on f_{1} scores is proposed. The dataset is available at https://vision.eng.au.dk/plant-seedlings-dataset
SMUTF: Schema Matching Using Generative Tags and Hybrid Features
We introduce SMUTF, a unique approach for large-scale tabular data schema matching (SM), which assumes that supervised learning does not affect performance in open-domain tasks, thereby enabling effective cross-domain matching. This system uniquely combines rule-based feature engineering, pre-trained language models, and generative large language models. In an innovative adaptation inspired by the Humanitarian Exchange Language, we deploy 'generative tags' for each data column, enhancing the effectiveness of SM. SMUTF exhibits extensive versatility, working seamlessly with any pre-existing pre-trained embeddings, classification methods, and generative models. Recognizing the lack of extensive, publicly available datasets for SM, we have created and open-sourced the HDXSM dataset from the public humanitarian data. We believe this to be the most exhaustive SM dataset currently available. In evaluations across various public datasets and the novel HDXSM dataset, SMUTF demonstrated exceptional performance, surpassing existing state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and} improving the F1 score by 11.84% and the AUC of ROC by 5.08%.
TabReD: A Benchmark of Tabular Machine Learning in-the-Wild
Benchmarks that closely reflect downstream application scenarios are essential for the streamlined adoption of new research in tabular machine learning (ML). In this work, we examine existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of industry-grade tabular data that are underrepresented in the datasets available to the academic community. First, tabular data often changes over time in real-world deployment scenarios. This impacts model performance and requires time-based train and test splits for correct model evaluation. Yet, existing academic tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. For each specific dataset, this can have a different impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features, which in turn can affect model selection. To fill the aforementioned gaps in academic benchmarks, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets covering a wide range of domains from finance to food delivery services. We assess a large number of tabular ML models in the feature-rich, temporally-evolving data setting facilitated by TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits more common in academic benchmarks. Furthermore, on the TabReD datasets, MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results, while more sophisticated DL models are yet to prove their effectiveness.
WikiTableEdit: A Benchmark for Table Editing by Natural Language Instruction
Tabular data, as a crucial form of data representation, exists in diverse formats on the Web. When confronted with complex and irregular tables, manual modification becomes a laborious task. This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of table editing tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on regular-shaped tables, wherein instructions are used to generate code in SQL, Python, or Excel Office-script for manipulating the tables. Nevertheless, editing tables with irregular structures, particularly those containing merged cells spanning multiple rows, poses a challenge when using code. To address this, we introduce the WikiTableEdit dataset. Leveraging 26,531 tables from the WikiSQL dataset, we automatically generate natural language instructions for six distinct basic operations and the corresponding outcomes, resulting in over 200,000 instances. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative large language models on the WikiTableEdit dataset to demonstrate the challenge of this task. The dataset will be released to the community to promote related researches.
Have Seen Me Before? Automating Dataset Updates Towards Reliable and Timely Evaluation
Due to the expanding capabilities and pre-training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) are facing increasingly serious evaluation challenges. On one hand, the data leakage issue cause over-estimation on existing benchmarks. On the other hand, periodically curating datasets manually is costly. In this paper, we propose to automate dataset updates for reliable and timely evaluation. The basic idea is to generate unseen and high-quality testing samples based on existing ones to mitigate leakage issues. In specific, we propose two strategies with systematically verification. First, the mimicking strategy employs LLMs to create new samples resembling existing ones, to the maximum extent preserving the stylistic of the original dataset. Our experiments demonstrate its evaluation stability across multiple instantiations and its effectiveness in dealing with data leakage issues in most cases. Second, for the cases that mimicking dataset works poorly, we design an extending strategy that adjusts the difficulty of the generated samples according to varying cognitive levels. This not only makes our evaluation more systematic, but also, with a balanced difficulty, even discern model capabilities better at fine-grained levels.
Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics
Large datasets have become commonplace in NLP research. However, the increased emphasis on data quantity has made it challenging to assess the quality of data. We introduce Data Maps---a model-based tool to characterize and diagnose datasets. We leverage a largely ignored source of information: the behavior of the model on individual instances during training (training dynamics) for building data maps. This yields two intuitive measures for each example---the model's confidence in the true class, and the variability of this confidence across epochs---obtained in a single run of training. Experiments across four datasets show that these model-dependent measures reveal three distinct regions in the data map, each with pronounced characteristics. First, our data maps show the presence of "ambiguous" regions with respect to the model, which contribute the most towards out-of-distribution generalization. Second, the most populous regions in the data are "easy to learn" for the model, and play an important role in model optimization. Finally, data maps uncover a region with instances that the model finds "hard to learn"; these often correspond to labeling errors. Our results indicate that a shift in focus from quantity to quality of data could lead to robust models and improved out-of-distribution generalization.
When to Learn What: Model-Adaptive Data Augmentation Curriculum
Data augmentation (DA) is widely used to improve the generalization of neural networks by enforcing the invariances and symmetries to pre-defined transformations applied to input data. However, a fixed augmentation policy may have different effects on each sample in different training stages but existing approaches cannot adjust the policy to be adaptive to each sample and the training model. In this paper, we propose Model Adaptive Data Augmentation (MADAug) that jointly trains an augmentation policy network to teach the model when to learn what. Unlike previous work, MADAug selects augmentation operators for each input image by a model-adaptive policy varying between training stages, producing a data augmentation curriculum optimized for better generalization. In MADAug, we train the policy through a bi-level optimization scheme, which aims to minimize a validation-set loss of a model trained using the policy-produced data augmentations. We conduct an extensive evaluation of MADAug on multiple image classification tasks and network architectures with thorough comparisons to existing DA approaches. MADAug outperforms or is on par with other baselines and exhibits better fairness: it brings improvement to all classes and more to the difficult ones. Moreover, MADAug learned policy shows better performance when transferred to fine-grained datasets. In addition, the auto-optimized policy in MADAug gradually introduces increasing perturbations and naturally forms an easy-to-hard curriculum.
Language Models as Continuous Self-Evolving Data Engineers
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on various tasks, while the further evolvement is limited to the lack of high-quality training data. In addition, traditional training approaches rely too much on expert-labeled data, setting an upper limit on the performance of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel paradigm that enables LLMs to train itself by autonomously generating, cleaning, reviewing, and annotating data with preference information, named LANCE. Our approach demonstrates that LLMs can serve as continuous self-evolving data engineers, significantly reducing the time and cost of the post-training data construction process. Through iterative fine-tuning on different variants of the Qwen2, we validate the effectiveness of LANCE across various tasks, showing that it can continuously improve model performance and maintain high-quality data generation. Across eight benchmark dimensions, LANCE resulted in an average score enhancement of 3.36 for Qwen2-7B and 2.70 for Qwen2-7B-Instruct. This training paradigm with autonomous data construction not only reduces the reliance on human experts or external models but also ensures that the data aligns with human values and preferences, paving the way for the development of future superintelligent systems that can exceed human capabilities.
The MERIT Dataset: Modelling and Efficiently Rendering Interpretable Transcripts
This paper introduces the MERIT Dataset, a multimodal (text + image + layout) fully labeled dataset within the context of school reports. Comprising over 400 labels and 33k samples, the MERIT Dataset is a valuable resource for training models in demanding Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks. By its nature (student grade reports), the MERIT Dataset can potentially include biases in a controlled way, making it a valuable tool to benchmark biases induced in Language Models (LLMs). The paper outlines the dataset's generation pipeline and highlights its main features in the textual, visual, layout, and bias domains. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we present a benchmark with token classification models, showing that the dataset poses a significant challenge even for SOTA models and that these would greatly benefit from including samples from the MERIT Dataset in their pretraining phase.
arXiVeri: Automatic table verification with GPT
Without accurate transcription of numerical data in scientific documents, a scientist cannot draw accurate conclusions. Unfortunately, the process of copying numerical data from one paper to another is prone to human error. In this paper, we propose to meet this challenge through the novel task of automatic table verification (AutoTV), in which the objective is to verify the accuracy of numerical data in tables by cross-referencing cited sources. To support this task, we propose a new benchmark, arXiVeri, which comprises tabular data drawn from open-access academic papers on arXiv. We introduce metrics to evaluate the performance of a table verifier in two key areas: (i) table matching, which aims to identify the source table in a cited document that corresponds to a target table, and (ii) cell matching, which aims to locate shared cells between a target and source table and identify their row and column indices accurately. By leveraging the flexible capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), we propose simple baselines for table verification. Our findings highlight the complexity of this task, even for state-of-the-art LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4. The code and benchmark will be made publicly available.
Investigating Multi-source Active Learning for Natural Language Inference
In recent years, active learning has been successfully applied to an array of NLP tasks. However, prior work often assumes that training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. This is problematic, as in real-life settings data may stem from several sources of varying relevance and quality. We show that four popular active learning schemes fail to outperform random selection when applied to unlabelled pools comprised of multiple data sources on the task of natural language inference. We reveal that uncertainty-based strategies perform poorly due to the acquisition of collective outliers, i.e., hard-to-learn instances that hamper learning and generalization. When outliers are removed, strategies are found to recover and outperform random baselines. In further analysis, we find that collective outliers vary in form between sources, and show that hard-to-learn data is not always categorically harmful. Lastly, we leverage dataset cartography to introduce difficulty-stratified testing and find that different strategies are affected differently by example learnability and difficulty.
UltraMedical: Building Specialized Generalists in Biomedicine
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains and are moving towards more specialized areas. Recent advanced proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Gemini have achieved significant advancements in biomedicine, which have also raised privacy and security challenges. The construction of specialized generalists hinges largely on high-quality datasets, enhanced by techniques like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback, and direct preference optimization. However, these leading technologies (e.g., preference learning) are still significantly limited in the open source community due to the scarcity of specialized data. In this paper, we present the UltraMedical collections, which consist of high-quality manual and synthetic datasets in the biomedicine domain, featuring preference annotations across multiple advanced LLMs. By utilizing these datasets, we fine-tune a suite of specialized medical models based on Llama-3 series, demonstrating breathtaking capabilities across various medical benchmarks. Moreover, we develop powerful reward models skilled in biomedical and general reward benchmark, enhancing further online preference learning within the biomedical LLM community.
Audio-Language Datasets of Scenes and Events: A Survey
Audio-language models (ALMs) process sounds to provide a linguistic description of sound-producing events and scenes. Recent advances in computing power and dataset creation have led to significant progress in this domain. This paper surveys existing datasets used for training audio-language models, emphasizing the recent trend towards using large, diverse datasets to enhance model performance. Key sources of these datasets include the Freesound platform and AudioSet that have contributed to the field's rapid growth. Although prior surveys primarily address techniques and training details, this survey categorizes and evaluates a wide array of datasets, addressing their origins, characteristics, and use cases. It also performs a data leak analysis to ensure dataset integrity and mitigate bias between datasets. This survey was conducted by analyzing research papers up to and including December 2023, and does not contain any papers after that period.