new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Oct 29

Many Ways to Be Lonely: Fine-Grained Characterization of Loneliness and Its Potential Changes in COVID-19

Loneliness has been associated with negative outcomes for physical and mental health. Understanding how people express and cope with various forms of loneliness is critical for early screening and targeted interventions to reduce loneliness, particularly among vulnerable groups such as young adults. To examine how different forms of loneliness and coping strategies manifest in loneliness self-disclosure, we built a dataset, FIG-Loneliness (FIne-Grained Loneliness) by using Reddit posts in two young adult-focused forums and two loneliness related forums consisting of a diverse age group. We provided annotations by trained human annotators for binary and fine-grained loneliness classifications of the posts. Trained on FIG-Loneliness, two BERT-based models were used to understand loneliness forms and authors' coping strategies in these forums. Our binary loneliness classification achieved an accuracy above 97%, and fine-grained loneliness category classification reached an average accuracy of 77% across all labeled categories. With FIG-Loneliness and model predictions, we found that loneliness expressions in the young adults related forums were distinct from other forums. Those in young adult-focused forums were more likely to express concerns pertaining to peer relationship, and were potentially more sensitive to geographical isolation impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Also, we showed that different forms of loneliness have differential use in coping strategies.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 19, 2022

Coherent Multimodal Reasoning with Iterative Self-Evaluation for Vision-Language Models

Despite significant advancements, current large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs) continue to struggle with complex, multi-step, cross-modal common sense reasoning tasks, often exhibiting a lack of "deliberative thinking." They tend to rely on superficial associations rather than deep, chained inference, particularly when integrating visual information with abstract concepts. To address this, we propose the Coherent Multimodal Reasoning Framework (CMRF), a novel approach that enhances LVLMs' common sense reasoning capabilities through an iterative, self-evaluating inference mechanism. CMRF mimics human problem-solving by decomposing complex queries, generating step-by-step inferences, and self-correcting errors. Our framework integrates three key modules: a Reasoning Decomposition Unit (RDU) for breaking down problems into sub-questions, a Contextual Inference Engine (CIE) for contextual inference, and a Coherence Assessment Module (CAM) for evaluating logical consistency and confidence. Coupled with an Adaptive Iterative Refinement strategy, CMRF systematically refines its reasoning paths. Built upon LLaVA-1.6-34B and trained on a novel Multimodal Daily Activity Reasoning (MDAR) dataset, CMRF achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source LVLMs on challenging benchmarks like VCR, A-OKVQA, and DailyLife-MRC. It attains an average accuracy of 69.4%, surpassing the best open-source baseline by +2.4 percentage points, with particular strength in complex reasoning scenarios. Extensive ablation studies and human evaluations confirm the critical contributions of each module and the effectiveness of iterative refinement in fostering more coherent and accurate reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 4

DatasetResearch: Benchmarking Agent Systems for Demand-Driven Dataset Discovery

The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 9

Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC): Sample Collection, Data Curation, and Beyond

Large-scale data collection is essential for developing personalized training data, mitigating the shortage of training data, and fine-tuning specialized models. However, creating high-quality datasets quickly and accurately remains a challenge due to annotation errors, the substantial time and costs associated with human labor. To address these issues, we propose Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC), an innovative methodology that automates dataset creation with negligible cost and high efficiency. Taking the image classification task as a starting point, ADC leverages LLMs for the detailed class design and code generation to collect relevant samples via search engines, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation and speeding up the data generation process. Despite these advantages, ADC also encounters real-world challenges such as label errors (label noise) and imbalanced data distributions (label bias). We provide open-source software that incorporates existing methods for label error detection, robust learning under noisy and biased data, ensuring a higher-quality training data and more robust model training procedure. Furthermore, we design three benchmark datasets focused on label noise detection, label noise learning, and class-imbalanced learning. These datasets are vital because there are few existing datasets specifically for label noise detection, despite its importance. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing popular methods on these datasets, thereby facilitating further research in the field.

  • 18 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024

AutoData: A Multi-Agent System for Open Web Data Collection

The exponential growth of data-driven systems and AI technologies has intensified the demand for high-quality web-sourced datasets. While existing datasets have proven valuable, conventional web data collection approaches face significant limitations in terms of human effort and scalability. Current data-collecting solutions fall into two categories: wrapper-based methods that struggle with adaptability and reproducibility, and large language model (LLM)-based approaches that incur substantial computational and financial costs. To address these challenges, we propose AutoData, a novel multi-agent system for Automated web Data collection, that requires minimal human intervention, i.e., only necessitating a natural language instruction specifying the desired dataset. In addition, AutoData is designed with a robust multi-agent architecture, featuring a novel oriented message hypergraph coordinated by a central task manager, to efficiently organize agents across research and development squads. Besides, we introduce a novel hypergraph cache system to advance the multi-agent collaboration process that enables efficient automated data collection and mitigates the token cost issues prevalent in existing LLM-based systems. Moreover, we introduce Instruct2DS, a new benchmark dataset supporting live data collection from web sources across three domains: academic, finance, and sports. Comprehensive evaluations over Instruct2DS and three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate AutoData's superior performance compared to baseline methods. Case studies on challenging tasks such as picture book collection and paper extraction from surveys further validate its applicability. Our source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GraphResearcher/AutoData.

  • 12 authors
·
May 21

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024

Coreset Sampling from Open-Set for Fine-Grained Self-Supervised Learning

Deep learning in general domains has constantly been extended to domain-specific tasks requiring the recognition of fine-grained characteristics. However, real-world applications for fine-grained tasks suffer from two challenges: a high reliance on expert knowledge for annotation and necessity of a versatile model for various downstream tasks in a specific domain (e.g., prediction of categories, bounding boxes, or pixel-wise annotations). Fortunately, the recent self-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach to pretrain a model without annotations, serving as an effective initialization for any downstream tasks. Since SSL does not rely on the presence of annotation, in general, it utilizes the large-scale unlabeled dataset, referred to as an open-set. In this sense, we introduce a novel Open-Set Self-Supervised Learning problem under the assumption that a large-scale unlabeled open-set is available, as well as the fine-grained target dataset, during a pretraining phase. In our problem setup, it is crucial to consider the distribution mismatch between the open-set and target dataset. Hence, we propose SimCore algorithm to sample a coreset, the subset of an open-set that has a minimum distance to the target dataset in the latent space. We demonstrate that SimCore significantly improves representation learning performance through extensive experimental settings, including eleven fine-grained datasets and seven open-sets in various downstream tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 20, 2023

Self-Supervised Dataset Distillation for Transfer Learning

Dataset distillation methods have achieved remarkable success in distilling a large dataset into a small set of representative samples. However, they are not designed to produce a distilled dataset that can be effectively used for facilitating self-supervised pre-training. To this end, we propose a novel problem of distilling an unlabeled dataset into a set of small synthetic samples for efficient self-supervised learning (SSL). We first prove that a gradient of synthetic samples with respect to a SSL objective in naive bilevel optimization is biased due to the randomness originating from data augmentations or masking. To address this issue, we propose to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between a model's representations of the synthetic examples and their corresponding learnable target feature representations for the inner objective, which does not introduce any randomness. Our primary motivation is that the model obtained by the proposed inner optimization can mimic the self-supervised target model. To achieve this, we also introduce the MSE between representations of the inner model and the self-supervised target model on the original full dataset for outer optimization. Lastly, assuming that a feature extractor is fixed, we only optimize a linear head on top of the feature extractor, which allows us to reduce the computational cost and obtain a closed-form solution of the head with kernel ridge regression. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our method on various applications involving transfer learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

LEMUR Neural Network Dataset: Towards Seamless AutoML

Neural networks are fundamental in artificial intelligence, driving progress in computer vision and natural language processing. High-quality datasets are crucial for their development, and there is growing interest in datasets composed of neural networks themselves to support benchmarking, automated machine learning (AutoML), and model analysis. We introduce LEMUR, an open source dataset of neural network models with well-structured code for diverse architectures across tasks such as object detection, image classification, segmentation, and natural language processing. LEMUR is primarily designed to provide a rich source of structured model representations and associated performance data, enabling the fine-tuning of large language models for AutoML applications. Leveraging Python and PyTorch, LEMUR enables seamless extension to new datasets and models while maintaining consistency. It integrates an Optuna-powered framework for evaluation, hyperparameter optimization, statistical analysis, and graphical insights. LEMUR VR extension enables the seamless deployment of models in virtual reality, optimizing their performance on resource-constrained devices. Providing tools for model evaluation, preprocessing, and database management, LEMUR supports researchers and practitioners in developing, testing, and analyzing neural networks. It offers an API that delivers comprehensive information about neural network models and their complete performance statistics with a single request, which can be used in experiments with code-generating large language models. The LEMUR and its plugins are accessible as open source projects under the MIT license at https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-dataset, https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-plots and https://github.com/ABrain-One/nn-vr.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 14

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023 1

Expanding Small-Scale Datasets with Guided Imagination

The power of DNNs relies heavily on the quantity and quality of training data. However, collecting and annotating data on a large scale is often expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we explore a new task, termed dataset expansion, aimed at expanding a ready-to-use small dataset by automatically creating new labeled samples. To this end, we present a Guided Imagination Framework (GIF) that leverages cutting-edge generative models like DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion (SD) to "imagine" and create informative new data from the input seed data. Specifically, GIF conducts data imagination by optimizing the latent features of the seed data in the semantically meaningful space of the prior model, resulting in the creation of photo-realistic images with new content. To guide the imagination towards creating informative samples for model training, we introduce two key criteria, i.e., class-maintained information boosting and sample diversity promotion. These criteria are verified to be essential for effective dataset expansion: GIF-SD obtains 13.5% higher model accuracy on natural image datasets than unguided expansion with SD. With these essential criteria, GIF successfully expands small datasets in various scenarios, boosting model accuracy by 36.9% on average over six natural image datasets and by 13.5% on average over three medical datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Vanint/DatasetExpansion.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2022

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.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 9, 2021

Datasets for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024 1

A New Pipeline For Generating Instruction Dataset via RAG and Self Fine-Tuning

With the rapid development of large language models in recent years, there has been an increasing demand for domain-specific Agents that can cater to the unique needs of enterprises and organizations. Unlike general models, which strive for broad coverage, these specialized Agents rely on focused datasets tailored to their intended applications. This research proposes a pipeline that leverages the power of LLMs and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation related framework to construct high-quality instruction datasets for fine-tuning on specific domains using custom document collections. By ingesting domain-specific documents, the pipeline generates relevant and contextually appropriate instructions, thus effectively creating a comprehensive dataset for fine-tuning LLMs on the target domain. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional dataset creation methods, which often rely on manual curation or web-scraping techniques that may introduce noise and irrelevant data. Notably, our pipeline offers a dynamic solution that can quickly adapt to updates or modifications in the domain-specific document collection, eliminating the need for complete retraining. Additionally, it addresses the challenge of data scarcity by enabling the generation of instruction datasets from a limited set of initial documents, rendering it suitable for unpopular or specialized domains where comprehensive datasets are scarce. As a case study, we apply this approach to the domain of psychiatry, a field requiring specialized knowledge and sensitive handling of patient information. The resulting fine-tuned LLM demonstrates showcases the viability of the proposed approach and underscores its potential for widespread adoption across various industries and domains where tailored, accurate, and contextually relevant language models are indispensable.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 11, 2024

Efficient Self-Supervised Learning for Earth Observation via Dynamic Dataset Curation

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has enabled the development of vision foundation models for Earth Observation (EO), demonstrating strong transferability across diverse remote sensing tasks. While prior work has focused on network architectures and training strategies, the role of dataset curation, especially in balancing and diversifying pre-training datasets, remains underexplored. In EO, this challenge is amplified by the redundancy and heavy-tailed distributions common in satellite imagery, which can lead to biased representations and inefficient training. In this work, we propose a dynamic dataset pruning strategy designed to improve SSL pre-training by maximizing dataset diversity and balance. Our method iteratively refines the training set without requiring a pre-existing feature extractor, making it well-suited for domains where curated datasets are limited or unavailable. We demonstrate our approach on the Sentinel-1 Wave Mode (WV) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) archive, a challenging dataset dominated by ocean observations. We train models from scratch on the entire Sentinel-1 WV archive spanning 10 years. Across three downstream tasks, our results show that dynamic pruning improves both computational efficiency and representation quality, leading to stronger transferability. We also release the weights of Nereus-SAR-1, the first model in the Nereus family, a series of foundation models for ocean observation and analysis using SAR imagery, at github.com/galeio-research/nereus-sar-models/.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 9

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

AutoSynth: Learning to Generate 3D Training Data for Object Point Cloud Registration

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost.To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a 4056.43 times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet and IDAM. Our results on TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

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 .

  • 3 authors
·
May 15, 2023

Precision at Scale: Domain-Specific Datasets On-Demand

In the realm of self-supervised learning (SSL), conventional wisdom has gravitated towards the utility of massive, general domain datasets for pretraining robust backbones. In this paper, we challenge this idea by exploring if it is possible to bridge the scale between general-domain datasets and (traditionally smaller) domain-specific datasets to reduce the current performance gap. More specifically, we propose Precision at Scale (PaS), a novel method for the autonomous creation of domain-specific datasets on-demand. The modularity of the PaS pipeline enables leveraging state-of-the-art foundational and generative models to create a collection of images of any given size belonging to any given domain with minimal human intervention. Extensive analysis in two complex domains, proves the superiority of PaS datasets over existing traditional domain-specific datasets in terms of diversity, scale, and effectiveness in training visual transformers and convolutional neural networks. Most notably, we prove that automatically generated domain-specific datasets lead to better pretraining than large-scale supervised datasets such as ImageNet-1k and ImageNet-21k. Concretely, models trained on domain-specific datasets constructed by PaS pipeline, beat ImageNet-1k pretrained backbones by at least 12% in all the considered domains and classification tasks and lead to better food domain performance than supervised ImageNet-21k pretrain while being 12 times smaller. Code repository: https://github.com/jesusmolrdv/Precision-at-Scale/

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

Datasheets Aren't Enough: DataRubrics for Automated Quality Metrics and Accountability

High-quality datasets are fundamental to training and evaluating machine learning models, yet their creation-especially with accurate human annotations-remains a significant challenge. Many dataset paper submissions lack originality, diversity, or rigorous quality control, and these shortcomings are often overlooked during peer review. Submissions also frequently omit essential details about dataset construction and properties. While existing tools such as datasheets aim to promote transparency, they are largely descriptive and do not provide standardized, measurable methods for evaluating data quality. Similarly, metadata requirements at conferences promote accountability but are inconsistently enforced. To address these limitations, this position paper advocates for the integration of systematic, rubric-based evaluation metrics into the dataset review process-particularly as submission volumes continue to grow. We also explore scalable, cost-effective methods for synthetic data generation, including dedicated tools and LLM-as-a-judge approaches, to support more efficient evaluation. As a call to action, we introduce DataRubrics, a structured framework for assessing the quality of both human- and model-generated datasets. Leveraging recent advances in LLM-based evaluation, DataRubrics offers a reproducible, scalable, and actionable solution for dataset quality assessment, enabling both authors and reviewers to uphold higher standards in data-centric research. We also release code to support reproducibility of LLM-based evaluations at https://github.com/datarubrics/datarubrics.

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.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 19, 2024

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.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 23, 2023

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 15, 2023

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 9, 2021

ScIRGen: Synthesize Realistic and Large-Scale RAG Dataset for Scientific Research

Scientific researchers need intensive information about datasets to effectively evaluate and develop theories and methodologies. The information needs regarding datasets are implicitly embedded in particular research tasks, rather than explicitly expressed in search queries. However, existing scientific retrieval and question-answering (QA) datasets typically address straightforward questions, which do not align with the distribution of real-world research inquiries. To bridge this gap, we developed ScIRGen, a dataset generation framework for scientific QA \& retrieval that more accurately reflects the information needs of professional science researchers, and uses it to create a large-scale scientific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) dataset with realistic queries, datasets and papers. Technically, we designed a dataset-oriented information extraction method that leverages academic papers to augment the dataset representation. We then proposed a question generation framework by employing cognitive taxonomy to ensure the quality of synthesized questions. We also design a method to automatically filter synthetic answers based on the perplexity shift of LLMs, which is highly aligned with human judgment of answers' validity. Collectively, these methodologies culminated in the creation of the 61k QA dataset, ScIRGen-Geo. We benchmarked representative methods on the ScIRGen-Geo dataset for their question-answering and retrieval capabilities, finding out that current methods still suffer from reasoning from complex questions. This work advances the development of more sophisticated tools to support the intricate information needs of the scientific community.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 9

Improving Fractal Pre-training

The deep neural networks used in modern computer vision systems require enormous image datasets to train them. These carefully-curated datasets typically have a million or more images, across a thousand or more distinct categories. The process of creating and curating such a dataset is a monumental undertaking, demanding extensive effort and labelling expense and necessitating careful navigation of technical and social issues such as label accuracy, copyright ownership, and content bias. What if we had a way to harness the power of large image datasets but with few or none of the major issues and concerns currently faced? This paper extends the recent work of Kataoka et. al. (2020), proposing an improved pre-training dataset based on dynamically-generated fractal images. Challenging issues with large-scale image datasets become points of elegance for fractal pre-training: perfect label accuracy at zero cost; no need to store/transmit large image archives; no privacy/demographic bias/concerns of inappropriate content, as no humans are pictured; limitless supply and diversity of images; and the images are free/open-source. Perhaps surprisingly, avoiding these difficulties imposes only a small penalty in performance. Leveraging a newly-proposed pre-training task -- multi-instance prediction -- our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning a network pre-trained using fractals attains 92.7-98.1% of the accuracy of an ImageNet pre-trained network.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 6, 2021

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24, 2023 1

MegaScience: Pushing the Frontiers of Post-Training Datasets for Science Reasoning

Scientific reasoning is critical for developing AI scientists and supporting human researchers in advancing the frontiers of natural science discovery. However, the open-source community has primarily focused on mathematics and coding while neglecting the scientific domain, largely due to the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality, verifiable scientific reasoning datasets. To bridge this gap, we first present TextbookReasoning, an open dataset featuring truthful reference answers extracted from 12k university-level scientific textbooks, comprising 650k reasoning questions spanning 7 scientific disciplines. We further introduce MegaScience, a large-scale mixture of high-quality open-source datasets totaling 1.25 million instances, developed through systematic ablation studies that evaluate various data selection methodologies to identify the optimal subset for each publicly available scientific dataset. Meanwhile, we build a comprehensive evaluation system covering diverse subjects and question types across 15 benchmarks, incorporating comprehensive answer extraction strategies to ensure accurate evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that our datasets achieve superior performance and training efficiency with more concise response lengths compared to existing open-source scientific datasets. Furthermore, we train Llama3.1, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3 series base models on MegaScience, which significantly outperform the corresponding official instruct models in average performance. In addition, MegaScience exhibits greater effectiveness for larger and stronger models, suggesting a scaling benefit for scientific tuning. We release our data curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and seven trained models to the community to advance scientific reasoning research.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 22 2

Jumpstarting Surgical Computer Vision

Purpose: General consensus amongst researchers and industry points to a lack of large, representative annotated datasets as the biggest obstacle to progress in the field of surgical data science. Self-supervised learning represents a solution to part of this problem, removing the reliance on annotations. However, the robustness of current self-supervised learning methods to domain shifts remains unclear, limiting our understanding of its utility for leveraging diverse sources of surgical data. Methods: In this work, we employ self-supervised learning to flexibly leverage diverse surgical datasets, thereby learning taskagnostic representations that can be used for various surgical downstream tasks. Based on this approach, to elucidate the impact of pre-training on downstream task performance, we explore 22 different pre-training dataset combinations by modulating three variables: source hospital, type of surgical procedure, and pre-training scale (number of videos). We then finetune the resulting model initializations on three diverse downstream tasks: namely, phase recognition and critical view of safety in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and phase recognition in laparoscopic hysterectomy. Results: Controlled experimentation highlights sizable boosts in performance across various tasks, datasets, and labeling budgets. However, this performance is intricately linked to the composition of the pre-training dataset, robustly proven through several study stages. Conclusion: The composition of pre-training datasets can severely affect the effectiveness of SSL methods for various downstream tasks and should critically inform future data collection efforts to scale the application of SSL methodologies. Keywords: Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning, Surgical Computer Vision, Endoscopic Videos, Critical View of Safety, Phase Recognition

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 10, 2023

MCTED: A Machine-Learning-Ready Dataset for Digital Elevation Model Generation From Mars Imagery

This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.

ESA-Datalabs ESA Datalabs
·
Sep 9

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/

  • 16 authors
·
Oct 15, 2022

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11, 2024

A Benchmark Time Series Dataset for Semiconductor Fabrication Manufacturing Constructed using Component-based Discrete-Event Simulation Models

Advancements in high-computing devices increase the necessity for improved and new understanding and development of smart manufacturing factories. Discrete-event models with simulators have been shown to be critical to architect, designing, building, and operating the manufacturing of semiconductor chips. The diffusion, implantation, and lithography machines have intricate processes due to their feedforward and feedback connectivity. The dataset collected from simulations of the factory models holds the promise of generating valuable machine-learning models. As surrogate data-based models, their executions are highly efficient compared to the physics-based counterpart models. For the development of surrogate models, it is beneficial to have publicly available benchmark simulation models that are grounded in factory models that have concise structures and accurate behaviors. Hence, in this research, a dataset is devised and constructed based on a benchmark model of an Intel semiconductor fabrication factory. The model is formalized using the Parallel Discrete-Event System Specification and executed using the DEVS-Suite simulator. The time series dataset is constructed using discrete-event time trajectories. This dataset is further analyzed and used to develop baseline univariate and multivariate machine learning models. The dataset can also be utilized in the machine learning community for behavioral analysis based on formalized and scalable component-based discrete-event models and simulations.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 17, 2024

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.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 5, 2024

UltraVideo: High-Quality UHD Video Dataset with Comprehensive Captions

The quality of the video dataset (image quality, resolution, and fine-grained caption) greatly influences the performance of the video generation model. The growing demand for video applications sets higher requirements for high-quality video generation models. For example, the generation of movie-level Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos and the creation of 4K short video content. However, the existing public datasets cannot support related research and applications. In this paper, we first propose a high-quality open-sourced UHD-4K (22.4\% of which are 8K) text-to-video dataset named UltraVideo, which contains a wide range of topics (more than 100 kinds), and each video has 9 structured captions with one summarized caption (average of 824 words). Specifically, we carefully design a highly automated curation process with four stages to obtain the final high-quality dataset: i) collection of diverse and high-quality video clips. ii) statistical data filtering. iii) model-based data purification. iv) generation of comprehensive, structured captions. In addition, we expand Wan to UltraWan-1K/-4K, which can natively generate high-quality 1K/4K videos with more consistent text controllability, demonstrating the effectiveness of our data curation.We believe that this work can make a significant contribution to future research on UHD video generation. UltraVideo dataset and UltraWan models are available at https://xzc-zju.github.io/projects/UltraVideo.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 16

DRAGON: A Large-Scale Dataset of Realistic Images Generated by Diffusion Models

The remarkable ease of use of diffusion models for image generation has led to a proliferation of synthetic content online. While these models are often employed for legitimate purposes, they are also used to generate fake images that support misinformation and hate speech. Consequently, it is crucial to develop robust tools capable of detecting whether an image has been generated by such models. Many current detection methods, however, require large volumes of sample images for training. Unfortunately, due to the rapid evolution of the field, existing datasets often cover only a limited range of models and quickly become outdated. In this work, we introduce DRAGON, a comprehensive dataset comprising images from 25 diffusion models, spanning both recent advancements and older, well-established architectures. The dataset contains a broad variety of images representing diverse subjects. To enhance image realism, we propose a simple yet effective pipeline that leverages a large language model to expand input prompts, thereby generating more diverse and higher-quality outputs, as evidenced by improvements in standard quality metrics. The dataset is provided in multiple sizes (ranging from extra-small to extra-large) to accomodate different research scenarios. DRAGON is designed to support the forensic community in developing and evaluating detection and attribution techniques for synthetic content. Additionally, the dataset is accompanied by a dedicated test set, intended to serve as a benchmark for assessing the performance of newly developed methods.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16

Large Language Models and Synthetic Data for Monitoring Dataset Mentions in Research Papers

Tracking how data is mentioned and used in research papers provides critical insights for improving data discoverability, quality, and production. However, manually identifying and classifying dataset mentions across vast academic literature is resource-intensive and not scalable. This paper presents a machine learning framework that automates dataset mention detection across research domains by leveraging large language models (LLMs), synthetic data, and a two-stage fine-tuning process. We employ zero-shot extraction from research papers, an LLM-as-a-Judge for quality assessment, and a reasoning agent for refinement to generate a weakly supervised synthetic dataset. The Phi-3.5-mini instruct model is pre-fine-tuned on this dataset, followed by fine-tuning on a manually annotated subset. At inference, a ModernBERT-based classifier efficiently filters dataset mentions, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high recall. Evaluated on a held-out manually annotated sample, our fine-tuned model outperforms NuExtract-v1.5 and GLiNER-large-v2.1 in dataset extraction accuracy. Our results highlight how LLM-generated synthetic data can effectively address training data scarcity, improving generalization in low-resource settings. This framework offers a pathway toward scalable monitoring of dataset usage, enhancing transparency, and supporting researchers, funders, and policymakers in identifying data gaps and strengthening data accessibility for informed decision-making.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14

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/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 25, 2024

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 3, 2020

DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models

Can the rapid advances in code generation, function calling, and data analysis using large language models (LLMs) help automate the search and verification of hypotheses purely from a set of provided datasets? To evaluate this question, we present DiscoveryBench, the first comprehensive benchmark that formalizes the multi-step process of data-driven discovery. The benchmark is designed to systematically assess current model capabilities in discovery tasks and provide a useful resource for improving them. Our benchmark contains 264 tasks collected across 6 diverse domains, such as sociology and engineering, by manually deriving discovery workflows from published papers to approximate the real-world challenges faced by researchers, where each task is defined by a dataset, its metadata, and a discovery goal in natural language. We additionally provide 903 synthetic tasks to conduct controlled evaluations across task complexity. Furthermore, our structured formalism of data-driven discovery enables a facet-based evaluation that provides useful insights into different failure modes. We evaluate several popular LLM-based reasoning frameworks using both open and closed LLMs as baselines on DiscoveryBench and find that even the best system scores only 25%. Our benchmark, thus, illustrates the challenges in autonomous data-driven discovery and serves as a valuable resource for the community to make progress.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

EdNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Dataset in Education

With advances in Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) and the ever-growing scale of Interactive Educational Systems (IESs), data-driven approach has become a common recipe for various tasks such as knowledge tracing and learning path recommendation. Unfortunately, collecting real students' interaction data is often challenging, which results in the lack of public large-scale benchmark dataset reflecting a wide variety of student behaviors in modern IESs. Although several datasets, such as ASSISTments, Junyi Academy, Synthetic and STATICS, are publicly available and widely used, they are not large enough to leverage the full potential of state-of-the-art data-driven models and limits the recorded behaviors to question-solving activities. To this end, we introduce EdNet, a large-scale hierarchical dataset of diverse student activities collected by Santa, a multi-platform self-study solution equipped with artificial intelligence tutoring system. EdNet contains 131,441,538 interactions from 784,309 students collected over more than 2 years, which is the largest among the ITS datasets released to the public so far. Unlike existing datasets, EdNet provides a wide variety of student actions ranging from question-solving to lecture consumption and item purchasing. Also, EdNet has a hierarchical structure where the student actions are divided into 4 different levels of abstractions. The features of EdNet are domain-agnostic, allowing EdNet to be extended to different domains easily. The dataset is publicly released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license for research purposes. We plan to host challenges in multiple AIEd tasks with EdNet to provide a common ground for the fair comparison between different state of the art models and encourage the development of practical and effective methods.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 6, 2019

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 15, 2020

Unifying Self-Supervised Clustering and Energy-Based Models

Self-supervised learning excels at learning representations from large amounts of data. At the same time, generative models offer the complementary property of learning information about the underlying data generation process. In this study, we aim at establishing a principled connection between these two paradigms and highlight the benefits of their complementarity. In particular, we perform an analysis of self-supervised learning objectives, elucidating the underlying probabilistic graphical models and presenting a standardized methodology for their derivation from first principles. The analysis suggests a natural means of integrating self-supervised learning with likelihood-based generative models. We instantiate this concept within the realm of cluster-based self-supervised learning and energy models, introducing a lower bound proven to reliably penalize the most important failure modes and unlocking full unification. Our theoretical findings are substantiated through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, demonstrating that our objective function allows to jointly train a backbone network in a discriminative and generative fashion, consequently outperforming existing self-supervised learning strategies in terms of clustering, generation and out-of-distribution detection performance by a wide margin. We also demonstrate that the solution can be integrated into a neuro-symbolic framework to tackle a simple yet non-trivial instantiation of the symbol grounding problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/emsansone/GEDI.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

Alloprof: a new French question-answer education dataset and its use in an information retrieval case study

Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 10, 2023

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.

  • 34 authors
·
Apr 27, 2023

Evaluating Self-Supervised Learning in Medical Imaging: A Benchmark for Robustness, Generalizability, and Multi-Domain Impact

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in medical imaging, addressing the chronic challenge of limited labeled data in healthcare settings. While SSL has shown impressive results, existing studies in the medical domain are often limited in scope, focusing on specific datasets or modalities, or evaluating only isolated aspects of model performance. This fragmented evaluation approach poses a significant challenge, as models deployed in critical medical settings must not only achieve high accuracy but also demonstrate robust performance and generalizability across diverse datasets and varying conditions. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive evaluation of SSL methods within the medical domain, with a particular focus on robustness and generalizability. Using the MedMNIST dataset collection as a standardized benchmark, we evaluate 8 major SSL methods across 11 different medical datasets. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of model performance in both in-domain scenarios and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, while exploring the effect of various initialization strategies, model architectures, and multi-domain pre-training. We further assess the generalizability of SSL methods through cross-dataset evaluations and the in-domain performance with varying label proportions (1%, 10%, and 100%) to simulate real-world scenarios with limited supervision. We hope this comprehensive benchmark helps practitioners and researchers make more informed decisions when applying SSL methods to medical applications.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 26, 2024

SELECT: A Large-Scale Benchmark of Data Curation Strategies for Image Classification

Data curation is the problem of how to collect and organize samples into a dataset that supports efficient learning. Despite the centrality of the task, little work has been devoted towards a large-scale, systematic comparison of various curation methods. In this work, we take steps towards a formal evaluation of data curation strategies and introduce SELECT, the first large-scale benchmark of curation strategies for image classification. In order to generate baseline methods for the SELECT benchmark, we create a new dataset, ImageNet++, which constitutes the largest superset of ImageNet-1K to date. Our dataset extends ImageNet with 5 new training-data shifts, each approximately the size of ImageNet-1K itself, and each assembled using a distinct curation strategy. We evaluate our data curation baselines in two ways: (i) using each training-data shift to train identical image classification models from scratch (ii) using the data itself to fit a pretrained self-supervised representation. Our findings show interesting trends, particularly pertaining to recent methods for data curation such as synthetic data generation and lookup based on CLIP embeddings. We show that although these strategies are highly competitive for certain tasks, the curation strategy used to assemble the original ImageNet-1K dataset remains the gold standard. We anticipate that our benchmark can illuminate the path for new methods to further reduce the gap. We release our checkpoints, code, documentation, and a link to our dataset at https://github.com/jimmyxu123/SELECT.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. AutoSDT leverages the coding capabilities and parametric knowledge of LLMs to search for diverse sources, select ecologically valid tasks, and synthesize accurate task instructions and code solutions. Using our pipeline, we construct AutoSDT-5K, a dataset of 5,404 coding tasks for data-driven discovery that covers four scientific disciplines and 756 unique Python packages. To the best of our knowledge, AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. Expert feedback on a subset of 256 tasks shows the effectiveness of AutoSDT: 93% of the collected tasks are ecologically valid, and 92.2% of the synthesized programs are functionally correct. Trained on AutoSDT-5K, the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct LLM series, dubbed AutoSDT-Coder, show substantial improvement on two challenging data-driven discovery benchmarks, ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench. Most notably, AutoSDT-Coder-32B reaches the same level of performance as GPT-4o on ScienceAgentBench with a success rate of 7.8%, doubling the performance of its base model. On DiscoveryBench, it lifts the hypothesis matching score to 8.1, bringing a 17.4% relative improvement and closing the gap between open-weight models and GPT-4o.

  • 19 authors
·
Jun 9

Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Contrastive and Masked Autoencoder Methods for Dealing with Small Datasets in Deep Learning for Medical Imaging

Deep learning in medical imaging has the potential to minimize the risk of diagnostic errors, reduce radiologist workload, and accelerate diagnosis. Training such deep learning models requires large and accurate datasets, with annotations for all training samples. However, in the medical imaging domain, annotated datasets for specific tasks are often small due to the high complexity of annotations, limited access, or the rarity of diseases. To address this challenge, deep learning models can be pre-trained on large image datasets without annotations using methods from the field of self-supervised learning. After pre-training, small annotated datasets are sufficient to fine-tune the models for a specific task. The most popular self-supervised pre-training approaches in medical imaging are based on contrastive learning. However, recent studies in natural image processing indicate a strong potential for masked autoencoder approaches. Our work compares state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods with the recently introduced masked autoencoder approach "SparK" for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on medical images. Therefore we pre-train on a large unannotated CT image dataset and fine-tune on several CT classification tasks. Due to the challenge of obtaining sufficient annotated training data in medical imaging, it is of particular interest to evaluate how the self-supervised pre-training methods perform when fine-tuning on small datasets. By experimenting with gradually reducing the training dataset size for fine-tuning, we find that the reduction has different effects depending on the type of pre-training chosen. The SparK pre-training method is more robust to the training dataset size than the contrastive methods. Based on our results, we propose the SparK pre-training for medical imaging tasks with only small annotated datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 12, 2023

Scale Efficient Training for Large Datasets

The rapid growth of dataset scales has been a key driver in advancing deep learning research. However, as dataset scale increases, the training process becomes increasingly inefficient due to the presence of low-value samples, including excessive redundant samples, overly challenging samples, and inefficient easy samples that contribute little to model improvement.To address this challenge, we propose Scale Efficient Training (SeTa) for large datasets, a dynamic sample pruning approach that losslessly reduces training time. To remove low-value samples, SeTa first performs random pruning to eliminate redundant samples, then clusters the remaining samples according to their learning difficulty measured by loss. Building upon this clustering, a sliding window strategy is employed to progressively remove both overly challenging and inefficient easy clusters following an easy-to-hard curriculum.We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale synthetic datasets, including ToCa, SS1M, and ST+MJ, each containing over 3 million samples.SeTa reduces training costs by up to 50\% while maintaining or improving performance, with minimal degradation even at 70\% cost reduction. Furthermore, experiments on various scale real datasets across various backbones (CNNs, Transformers, and Mambas) and diverse tasks (instruction tuning, multi-view stereo, geo-localization, composed image retrieval, referring image segmentation) demonstrate the powerful effectiveness and universality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/mrazhou/SeTa.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 17

DAPFAM: A Domain-Aware Patent Retrieval Dataset Aggregated at the Family Level

In the landscape of publicly available patent retrieval datasets, the need for explicit indomain and out-of-domain labeling, multi-jurisdiction coverage, balanced query domain representation and manageable sizes that support sub document level experiments on moderate computational resources is often overlooked. To address these gaps, we propose DAPFAM, a new open access domain-aware patent retrieval dataset constructed at the simple-family level. The dataset contains 1,247 domain balanced full text query families and 45,336 full text target families. The dataset is enriched by clear relevance judgments (forward/backward citations as positive links, random negatives), as well as explicit in-domain or out-of-domain relationships via a novel proposed labelling scheme based on via International Patent Classification (IPC) codes, resulting in 49,869 evaluation pairs. The dataset is multi jurisdictional, requires little to no preprocessing for retrieval evaluation, and remains of a size manageable for entities with limited ressources allowing for sub document level retrieval experiments without excessive computational costs. We describe our three-step data-curation pipeline, present comprehensive dataset statistics, and provide baseline experiments using lexical and neural retrieval methods. Our baseline experiments highlight significant challenges in crossdomain patent retrieval. The dataset will be publicly available (for now the access link is this repository: https://osf.io/vbyzd/?view_only=1a40242e0d1941a58aa854af3e50cf6b).

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 27

Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) like GPTs, trained on vast datasets, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and planning, achieving human-level performance in various tasks. Most studies focus on enhancing these models by training on ever-larger datasets to build more powerful foundation models. While training stronger models is important, enabling models to evolve during inference is equally crucial, a process we refer to as AI self-evolution. Unlike large-scale training, self-evolution may rely on limited data or interactions. Inspired by the columnar organization of the human cerebral cortex, we hypothesize that AI models could develop cognitive abilities and build internal representations through iterative interactions with their environment. To achieve this, models need long-term memory (LTM) to store and manage processed interaction data. LTM supports self-evolution by representing diverse experiences across environments and agents. In this report, we explore AI self-evolution and its potential to enhance models during inference. We examine LTM's role in lifelong learning, allowing models to evolve based on accumulated interactions. We outline the structure of LTM and the systems needed for effective data retention and representation. We also classify approaches for building personalized models with LTM data and show how these models achieve self-evolution through interaction. Using LTM, our multi-agent framework OMNE achieved first place on the GAIA benchmark, demonstrating LTM's potential for AI self-evolution. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research, emphasizing the importance of LTM for advancing AI technology and its practical applications.

  • 14 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Learning from Future: A Novel Self-Training Framework for Semantic Segmentation

Self-training has shown great potential in semi-supervised learning. Its core idea is to use the model learned on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, and in turn teach itself. To obtain valid supervision, active attempts typically employ a momentum teacher for pseudo-label prediction yet observe the confirmation bias issue, where the incorrect predictions may provide wrong supervision signals and get accumulated in the training process. The primary cause of such a drawback is that the prevailing self-training framework acts as guiding the current state with previous knowledge, because the teacher is updated with the past student only. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel self-training strategy, which allows the model to learn from the future. Concretely, at each training step, we first virtually optimize the student (i.e., caching the gradients without applying them to the model weights), then update the teacher with the virtual future student, and finally ask the teacher to produce pseudo-labels for the current student as the guidance. In this way, we manage to improve the quality of pseudo-labels and thus boost the performance. We also develop two variants of our future-self-training (FST) framework through peeping at the future both deeply (FST-D) and widely (FST-W). Taking the tasks of unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation and semi-supervised semantic segmentation as the instances, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach under a wide range of settings. Code will be made publicly available.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 14, 2022

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.

  • 19 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024 3

Quality Not Quantity: On the Interaction between Dataset Design and Robustness of CLIP

Web-crawled datasets have enabled remarkable generalization capabilities in recent image-text models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image pre-training) or Flamingo, but little is known about the dataset creation processes. In this work, we introduce a testbed of six publicly available data sources - YFCC, LAION, Conceptual Captions, WIT, RedCaps, Shutterstock - to investigate how pre-training distributions induce robustness in CLIP. We find that the performance of the pre-training data varies substantially across distribution shifts, with no single data source dominating. Moreover, we systematically study the interactions between these data sources and find that combining multiple sources does not necessarily yield better models, but rather dilutes the robustness of the best individual data source. We complement our empirical findings with theoretical insights from a simple setting, where combining the training data also results in diluted robustness. In addition, our theoretical model provides a candidate explanation for the success of the CLIP-based data filtering technique recently employed in the LAION dataset. Overall our results demonstrate that simply gathering a large amount of data from the web is not the most effective way to build a pre-training dataset for robust generalization, necessitating further study into dataset design. Code is available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/clip_quality_not_quantity.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 10, 2022

A Survey on Data Selection for Language Models

A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 26, 2024

A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers

Deep supervised learning models require high volume of labeled data to attain sufficiently good results. Although, the practice of gathering and annotating such big data is costly and laborious. Recently, the application of self supervised learning (SSL) in vision tasks has gained significant attention. The intuition behind SSL is to exploit the synchronous relationships within the data as a form of self-supervision, which can be versatile. In the current big data era, most of the data is unlabeled, and the success of SSL thus relies in finding ways to improve this vast amount of unlabeled data available. Thus its better for deep learning algorithms to reduce reliance on human supervision and instead focus on self-supervision based on the inherent relationships within the data. With the advent of ViTs, which have achieved remarkable results in computer vision, it is crucial to explore and understand the various SSL mechanisms employed for training these models specifically in scenarios where there is less label data available. In this survey we thus develop a comprehensive taxonomy of systematically classifying the SSL techniques based upon their representations and pre-training tasks being applied. Additionally, we discuss the motivations behind SSL, review popular pre-training tasks, and highlight the challenges and advancements in this field. Furthermore, we present a comparative analysis of different SSL methods, evaluate their strengths and limitations, and identify potential avenues for future research.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 30, 2024

Agent-based Learning of Materials Datasets from Scientific Literature

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence are transforming materials discovery. Yet, the availability of structured experimental data remains a bottleneck. The vast corpus of scientific literature presents a valuable and rich resource of such data. However, manual dataset creation from these resources is challenging due to issues in maintaining quality and consistency, scalability limitations, and the risk of human error and bias. Therefore, in this work, we develop a chemist AI agent, powered by large language models (LLMs), to overcome these challenges by autonomously creating structured datasets from natural language text, ranging from sentences and paragraphs to extensive scientific research articles. Our chemist AI agent, Eunomia, can plan and execute actions by leveraging the existing knowledge from decades of scientific research articles, scientists, the Internet and other tools altogether. We benchmark the performance of our approach in three different information extraction tasks with various levels of complexity, including solid-state impurity doping, metal-organic framework (MOF) chemical formula, and property relations. Our results demonstrate that our zero-shot agent, with the appropriate tools, is capable of attaining performance that is either superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned materials information extraction methods. This approach simplifies compilation of machine learning-ready datasets for various materials discovery applications, and significantly ease the accessibility of advanced natural language processing tools for novice users in natural language. The methodology in this work is developed as an open-source software on https://github.com/AI4ChemS/Eunomia.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

Quilt-1M: One Million Image-Text Pairs for Histopathology

Recent accelerations in multi-modal applications have been made possible with the plethora of image and text data available online. However, the scarcity of analogous data in the medical field, specifically in histopathology, has halted comparable progress. To enable similar representation learning for histopathology, we turn to YouTube, an untapped resource of videos, offering 1,087 hours of valuable educational histopathology videos from expert clinicians. From YouTube, we curate Quilt: a large-scale vision-language dataset consisting of 768,826 image and text pairs. Quilt was automatically curated using a mixture of models, including large language models, handcrafted algorithms, human knowledge databases, and automatic speech recognition. In comparison, the most comprehensive datasets curated for histopathology amass only around 200K samples. We combine Quilt with datasets from other sources, including Twitter, research papers, and the internet in general, to create an even larger dataset: Quilt-1M, with 1M paired image-text samples, marking it as the largest vision-language histopathology dataset to date. We demonstrate the value of Quilt-1M by fine-tuning a pre-trained CLIP model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on both zero-shot and linear probing tasks for classifying new histopathology images across 13 diverse patch-level datasets of 8 different sub-pathologies and cross-modal retrieval tasks.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

Peer-Ranked Precision: Creating a Foundational Dataset for Fine-Tuning Vision Models from DataSeeds' Annotated Imagery

The development of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, particularly diffusion-based models employed in computer vision and image generation tasks, is undergoing a paradigmatic shift in development methodologies. Traditionally dominated by a "Model Centric" approach, in which performance gains were primarily pursued through increasingly complex model architectures and hyperparameter optimization, the field is now recognizing a more nuanced "Data-Centric" approach. This emergent framework foregrounds the quality, structure, and relevance of training data as the principal driver of model performance. To operationalize this paradigm shift, we introduce the DataSeeds.AI sample dataset (the "DSD"), initially comprised of approximately 10,610 high-quality human peer-ranked photography images accompanied by extensive multi-tier annotations. The DSD is a foundational computer vision dataset designed to usher in a new standard for commercial image datasets. Representing a small fraction of DataSeed.AI's 100 million-plus image catalog, the DSD provides a scalable foundation necessary for robust commercial and multimodal AI development. Through this in-depth exploratory analysis, we document the quantitative improvements generated by the DSD on specific models against known benchmarks and make the code and the trained models used in our evaluation publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 5 2

Self-supervised Label Augmentation via Input Transformations

Self-supervised learning, which learns by constructing artificial labels given only the input signals, has recently gained considerable attention for learning representations with unlabeled datasets, i.e., learning without any human-annotated supervision. In this paper, we show that such a technique can be used to significantly improve the model accuracy even under fully-labeled datasets. Our scheme trains the model to learn both original and self-supervised tasks, but is different from conventional multi-task learning frameworks that optimize the summation of their corresponding losses. Our main idea is to learn a single unified task with respect to the joint distribution of the original and self-supervised labels, i.e., we augment original labels via self-supervision of input transformation. This simple, yet effective approach allows to train models easier by relaxing a certain invariant constraint during learning the original and self-supervised tasks simultaneously. It also enables an aggregated inference which combines the predictions from different augmentations to improve the prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we propose a novel knowledge transfer technique, which we refer to as self-distillation, that has the effect of the aggregated inference in a single (faster) inference. We demonstrate the large accuracy improvement and wide applicability of our framework on various fully-supervised settings, e.g., the few-shot and imbalanced classification scenarios.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2019

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.

  • 4 authors
·
May 3, 2023

Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching

The ultimate goal of Dataset Distillation is to synthesize a small synthetic dataset such that a model trained on this synthetic set will perform equally well as a model trained on the full, real dataset. Until now, no method of Dataset Distillation has reached this completely lossless goal, in part due to the fact that previous methods only remain effective when the total number of synthetic samples is extremely small. Since only so much information can be contained in such a small number of samples, it seems that to achieve truly loss dataset distillation, we must develop a distillation method that remains effective as the size of the synthetic dataset grows. In this work, we present such an algorithm and elucidate why existing methods fail to generate larger, high-quality synthetic sets. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on trajectory-matching, or optimizing the synthetic data to induce similar long-term training dynamics as the real data. We empirically find that the training stage of the trajectories we choose to match (i.e., early or late) greatly affects the effectiveness of the distilled dataset. Specifically, early trajectories (where the teacher network learns easy patterns) work well for a low-cardinality synthetic set since there are fewer examples wherein to distribute the necessary information. Conversely, late trajectories (where the teacher network learns hard patterns) provide better signals for larger synthetic sets since there are now enough samples to represent the necessary complex patterns. Based on our findings, we propose to align the difficulty of the generated patterns with the size of the synthetic dataset. In doing so, we successfully scale trajectory matching-based methods to larger synthetic datasets, achieving lossless dataset distillation for the very first time. Code and distilled datasets are available at https://gzyaftermath.github.io/DATM.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

When Can Models Learn From Explanations? A Formal Framework for Understanding the Roles of Explanation Data

Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 3, 2021

Toffee: Efficient Million-Scale Dataset Construction for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

In subject-driven text-to-image generation, recent works have achieved superior performance by training the model on synthetic datasets containing numerous image pairs. Trained on these datasets, generative models can produce text-aligned images for specific subject from arbitrary testing image in a zero-shot manner. They even outperform methods which require additional fine-tuning on testing images. However, the cost of creating such datasets is prohibitive for most researchers. To generate a single training pair, current methods fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-image model on the subject image to capture fine-grained details, then use the fine-tuned model to create images for the same subject based on creative text prompts. Consequently, constructing a large-scale dataset with millions of subjects can require hundreds of thousands of GPU hours. To tackle this problem, we propose Toffee, an efficient method to construct datasets for subject-driven editing and generation. Specifically, our dataset construction does not need any subject-level fine-tuning. After pre-training two generative models, we are able to generate infinite number of high-quality samples. We construct the first large-scale dataset for subject-driven image editing and generation, which contains 5 million image pairs, text prompts, and masks. Our dataset is 5 times the size of previous largest dataset, yet our cost is tens of thousands of GPU hours lower. To test the proposed dataset, we also propose a model which is capable of both subject-driven image editing and generation. By simply training the model on our proposed dataset, it obtains competitive results, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction framework.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024 2

YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark

Many recent advancements in Computer Vision are attributed to large datasets. Open-source software packages for Machine Learning and inexpensive commodity hardware have reduced the barrier of entry for exploring novel approaches at scale. It is possible to train models over millions of examples within a few days. Although large-scale datasets exist for image understanding, such as ImageNet, there are no comparable size video classification datasets. In this paper, we introduce YouTube-8M, the largest multi-label video classification dataset, composed of ~8 million videos (500K hours of video), annotated with a vocabulary of 4800 visual entities. To get the videos and their labels, we used a YouTube video annotation system, which labels videos with their main topics. While the labels are machine-generated, they have high-precision and are derived from a variety of human-based signals including metadata and query click signals. We filtered the video labels (Knowledge Graph entities) using both automated and manual curation strategies, including asking human raters if the labels are visually recognizable. Then, we decoded each video at one-frame-per-second, and used a Deep CNN pre-trained on ImageNet to extract the hidden representation immediately prior to the classification layer. Finally, we compressed the frame features and make both the features and video-level labels available for download. We trained various (modest) classification models on the dataset, evaluated them using popular evaluation metrics, and report them as baselines. Despite the size of the dataset, some of our models train to convergence in less than a day on a single machine using TensorFlow. We plan to release code for training a TensorFlow model and for computing metrics.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 27, 2016

Revisiting pre-trained remote sensing model benchmarks: resizing and normalization matters

Research in self-supervised learning (SSL) with natural images has progressed rapidly in recent years and is now increasingly being applied to and benchmarked with datasets containing remotely sensed imagery. A common benchmark case is to evaluate SSL pre-trained model embeddings on datasets of remotely sensed imagery with small patch sizes, e.g., 32x32 pixels, whereas standard SSL pre-training takes place with larger patch sizes, e.g., 224x224. Furthermore, pre-training methods tend to use different image normalization preprocessing steps depending on the dataset. In this paper, we show, across seven satellite and aerial imagery datasets of varying resolution, that by simply following the preprocessing steps used in pre-training (precisely, image sizing and normalization methods), one can achieve significant performance improvements when evaluating the extracted features on downstream tasks -- an important detail overlooked in previous work in this space. We show that by following these steps, ImageNet pre-training remains a competitive baseline for satellite imagery based transfer learning tasks -- for example we find that these steps give +32.28 to overall accuracy on the So2Sat random split dataset and +11.16 on the EuroSAT dataset. Finally, we report comprehensive benchmark results with a variety of simple baseline methods for each of the seven datasets, forming an initial benchmark suite for remote sensing imagery.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2023

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

Bee: A High-Quality Corpus and Full-Stack Suite to Unlock Advanced Fully Open MLLMs

Fully open multimodal large language models (MLLMs) currently lag behind proprietary counterparts, primarily due to a significant gap in data quality for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Existing open-source datasets are often plagued by widespread noise and a critical deficit in complex reasoning data, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which hinders the development of advanced model capabilities. Addressing these challenges, our work makes three primary contributions. First, we introduce Honey-Data-15M, a new SFT dataset comprising approximately 15 million QA pairs, processed through multiple cleaning techniques and enhanced with a novel dual-level (short and long) CoT enrichment strategy. Second, we introduce HoneyPipe, the data curation pipeline, and its underlying framework DataStudio, providing the community with a transparent and adaptable methodology for data curation that moves beyond static dataset releases. Finally, to validate our dataset and pipeline, we train Bee-8B, an 8B model on Honey-Data-15M. Experiments show that Bee-8B establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for fully open MLLMs, achieving performance that is competitive with, and in some cases surpasses, recent semi-open models such as InternVL3.5-8B. Our work delivers to the community a suite of foundational resources, including: the Honey-Data-15M corpus; the full-stack suite comprising HoneyPipe and DataStudio; training recipes; an evaluation harness; and the model weights. This effort demonstrates that a principled focus on data quality is a key pathway to developing fully open MLLMs that are highly competitive with their semi-open counterparts.

Open-Bee Open-Bee
·
Oct 15 2

Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment

The sharp increase in data-related expenses has motivated research into condensing datasets while retaining the most informative features. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm generates synthetic datasets that are representative enough to replace the original dataset in training a neural network. To avoid redundancy in these synthetic datasets, it is crucial that each element contains unique features and remains diverse from others during the synthesis stage. In this paper, we provide a thorough theoretical and empirical analysis of diversity within synthesized datasets. We argue that enhancing diversity can improve the parallelizable yet isolated synthesizing approach. Specifically, we introduce a novel method that employs dynamic and directed weight adjustment techniques to modulate the synthesis process, thereby maximizing the representativeness and diversity of each synthetic instance. Our method ensures that each batch of synthetic data mirrors the characteristics of a large, varying subset of the original dataset. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of our method, highlighting its effectiveness in producing diverse and representative synthetic datasets with minimal computational expense. Our code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.https://github.com/AngusDujw/Diversity-Driven-Synthesis.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 23, 2024

The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 72%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 25, 2023 2

Question-Answering Model for Schizophrenia Symptoms and Their Impact on Daily Life using Mental Health Forums Data

In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a Question Answering (QA) model for a specific medical field. The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology for building a medical dataset and obtain a QA model for analysis of symptoms and impact on daily life for a specific disease domain. The ``Mental Health'' forum was used, a forum dedicated to people suffering from schizophrenia and different mental disorders. Relevant posts of active users, who regularly participate, were extrapolated providing a new method of obtaining low-bias content and without privacy issues. Furthermore, it is shown how to pre-process the dataset to convert it into a QA dataset. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BioBERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated via F1-Score, Exact Match, Precision and Recall. Accurate empirical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining an accurate dataset for QA model implementation. By fine-tuning the BioBERT QA model, we achieved an F1 score of 0.885, showing a considerable improvement and outperforming the state-of-the-art model for mental disorders domain.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 30, 2023

A Dataset for Distilling Knowledge Priors from Literature for Therapeutic Design

AI-driven discovery can greatly reduce design time and enhance new therapeutics' effectiveness. Models using simulators explore broad design spaces but risk violating implicit constraints due to a lack of experimental priors. For example, in a new analysis we performed on a diverse set of models on the GuacaMol benchmark using supervised classifiers, over 60\% of molecules proposed had high probability of being mutagenic. In this work, we introduce \ourdataset, a dataset of priors for design problems extracted from literature describing compounds used in lab settings. It is constructed with LLM pipelines for discovering therapeutic entities in relevant paragraphs and summarizing information in concise fair-use facts. \ourdataset~ consists of 32.3 million pairs of natural language facts, and appropriate entity representations (i.e. SMILES or refseq IDs). To demonstrate the potential of the data, we train LLM, CLIP, and LLava architectures to reason jointly about text and design targets and evaluate on tasks from the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC). \ourdataset~is highly effective for creating models with strong priors: in supervised prediction problems that use our data as pretraining, our best models with 15M learnable parameters outperform larger 2B TxGemma on both regression and classification TDC tasks, and perform comparably to 9B models on average. Models built with \ourdataset~can be used as constraints while optimizing for novel molecules in GuacaMol, resulting in proposals that are safer and nearly as effective. We release our dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/medexanon/Medex{huggingface.co/datasets/medexanon/Medex}, and will provide expanded versions as available literature grows.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 14

Leaving Reality to Imagination: Robust Classification via Generated Datasets

Recent research on robustness has revealed significant performance gaps between neural image classifiers trained on datasets that are similar to the test set, and those that are from a naturally shifted distribution, such as sketches, paintings, and animations of the object categories observed during training. Prior work focuses on reducing this gap by designing engineered augmentations of training data or through unsupervised pretraining of a single large model on massive in-the-wild training datasets scraped from the Internet. However, the notion of a dataset is also undergoing a paradigm shift in recent years. With drastic improvements in the quality, ease-of-use, and access to modern generative models, generated data is pervading the web. In this light, we study the question: How do these generated datasets influence the natural robustness of image classifiers? We find that Imagenet classifiers trained on real data augmented with generated data achieve higher accuracy and effective robustness than standard training and popular augmentation strategies in the presence of natural distribution shifts. We analyze various factors influencing these results, including the choice of conditioning strategies and the amount of generated data. Lastly, we introduce and analyze an evolving generated dataset, ImageNet-G-v1, to better benchmark the design, utility, and critique of standalone generated datasets for robust and trustworthy machine learning. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/generative-robustness.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 5, 2023

Lbl2Vec: An Embedding-Based Approach for Unsupervised Document Retrieval on Predefined Topics

In this paper, we consider the task of retrieving documents with predefined topics from an unlabeled document dataset using an unsupervised approach. The proposed unsupervised approach requires only a small number of keywords describing the respective topics and no labeled document. Existing approaches either heavily relied on a large amount of additionally encoded world knowledge or on term-document frequencies. Contrariwise, we introduce a method that learns jointly embedded document and word vectors solely from the unlabeled document dataset in order to find documents that are semantically similar to the topics described by the keywords. The proposed method requires almost no text preprocessing but is simultaneously effective at retrieving relevant documents with high probability. When successively retrieving documents on different predefined topics from publicly available and commonly used datasets, we achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.95 on one dataset and 0.92 on another. Further, our method can be used for multiclass document classification, without the need to assign labels to the dataset in advance. Compared with an unsupervised classification baseline, we increased F1 scores from 76.6 to 82.7 and from 61.0 to 75.1 on the respective datasets. For easy replication of our approach, we make the developed Lbl2Vec code publicly available as a ready-to-use tool under the 3-Clause BSD license.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 12, 2022

A Spacecraft Dataset for Detection, Segmentation and Parts Recognition

Virtually all aspects of modern life depend on space technology. Thanks to the great advancement of computer vision in general and deep learning-based techniques in particular, over the decades, the world witnessed the growing use of deep learning in solving problems for space applications, such as self-driving robot, tracers, insect-like robot on cosmos and health monitoring of spacecraft. These are just some prominent examples that has advanced space industry with the help of deep learning. However, the success of deep learning models requires a lot of training data in order to have decent performance, while on the other hand, there are very limited amount of publicly available space datasets for the training of deep learning models. Currently, there is no public datasets for space-based object detection or instance segmentation, partly because manually annotating object segmentation masks is very time consuming as they require pixel-level labelling, not to mention the challenge of obtaining images from space. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by releasing a dataset for spacecraft detection, instance segmentation and part recognition. The main contribution of this work is the development of the dataset using images of space stations and satellites, with rich annotations including bounding boxes of spacecrafts and masks to the level of object parts, which are obtained with a mixture of automatic processes and manual efforts. We also provide evaluations with state-of-the-art methods in object detection and instance segmentation as a benchmark for the dataset. The link for downloading the proposed dataset can be found on https://github.com/Yurushia1998/SatelliteDataset.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 15, 2021

Towards a Universal Vibration Analysis Dataset: A Framework for Transfer Learning in Predictive Maintenance and Structural Health Monitoring

ImageNet has become a reputable resource for transfer learning, allowing the development of efficient ML models with reduced training time and data requirements. However, vibration analysis in predictive maintenance, structural health monitoring, and fault diagnosis, lacks a comparable large-scale, annotated dataset to facilitate similar advancements. To address this, a dataset framework is proposed that begins with bearing vibration data as an initial step towards creating a universal dataset for vibration-based spectrogram analysis for all machinery. The initial framework includes a collection of bearing vibration signals from various publicly available datasets. To demonstrate the advantages of this framework, experiments were conducted using a deep learning architecture, showing improvements in model performance when pre-trained on bearing vibration data and fine-tuned on a smaller, domain-specific dataset. These findings highlight the potential to parallel the success of ImageNet in visual computing but for vibration analysis. For future work, this research will include a broader range of vibration signals from multiple types of machinery, emphasizing spectrogram-based representations of the data. Each sample will be labeled according to machinery type, operational status, and the presence or type of faults, ensuring its utility for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. Additionally, a framework for data preprocessing, feature extraction, and model training specific to vibration data will be developed. This framework will standardize methodologies across the research community, allowing for collaboration and accelerating progress in predictive maintenance, structural health monitoring, and related fields. By mirroring the success of ImageNet in visual computing, this dataset has the potential to improve the development of intelligent systems in industrial applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 15

Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors

Advances in embedding models for text, image, audio, and video drive progress across multiple domains, including retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, vehicle/person reidentification, and face recognition. Many applications in these domains require an efficient method to retrieve items that are close to a given query in the embedding space while satisfying a filter condition based on the item's attributes, a problem known as Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (FANNS). In this work, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of FANNS methods and analyze how they are benchmarked in the literature. By doing so, we identify a key challenge in the current FANNS landscape: the lack of diverse and realistic datasets, particularly ones derived from the latest transformer-based text embedding models. To address this, we introduce a novel dataset consisting of embedding vectors for the abstracts of over 2.7 million research articles from the arXiv repository, accompanied by 11 real-world attributes such as authors and categories. We benchmark a wide range of FANNS methods on our novel dataset and find that each method has distinct strengths and limitations; no single approach performs best across all scenarios. ACORN, for example, supports various filter types and performs reliably across dataset scales but is often outperformed by more specialized methods. SeRF shows excellent performance for range filtering on ordered attributes but cannot handle categorical attributes. Filtered-DiskANN and UNG excel on the medium-scale dataset but fail on the large-scale dataset, highlighting the challenge posed by transformer-based embeddings, which are often more than an order of magnitude larger than earlier embeddings. We conclude that no universally best method exists.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 29

SciKnowEval: Evaluating Multi-level Scientific Knowledge of Large Language Models

The burgeoning utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in scientific research necessitates advanced benchmarks capable of evaluating their understanding and application of scientific knowledge comprehensively. To address this need, we introduce the SciKnowEval benchmark, a novel framework that systematically evaluates LLMs across five progressive levels of scientific knowledge: studying extensively, inquiring earnestly, thinking profoundly, discerning clearly, and practicing assiduously. These levels aim to assess the breadth and depth of scientific knowledge in LLMs, including knowledge coverage, inquiry and exploration capabilities, reflection and reasoning abilities, ethic and safety considerations, as well as practice proficiency. Specifically, we take biology and chemistry as the two instances of SciKnowEval and construct a dataset encompassing 50K multi-level scientific problems and solutions. By leveraging this dataset, we benchmark 20 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies. The results reveal that despite achieving state-of-the-art performance, the proprietary LLMs still have considerable room for improvement, particularly in addressing scientific computations and applications. We anticipate that SciKnowEval will establish a comprehensive standard for benchmarking LLMs in science research and discovery, and promote the development of LLMs that integrate scientific knowledge with strong safety awareness. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/hicai-zju/sciknoweval .

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

Prefix Conditioning Unifies Language and Label Supervision

Image-classification datasets have been used to pretrain image recognition models. Recently, web-scale image-caption datasets have emerged as a source of powerful pretraining alternative. Image-caption datasets are more ``open-domain'', containing a wider variety of scene types and vocabulary words than traditional classification datasets, and models trained on these datasets have demonstrated strong performance on few- and zero-shot recognition tasks. When naively unifying image-classification and -caption dataset, we show that such dataset biases negatively affect pre-training by reducing the generalizability of learned representations and thus jeopardizing zero-shot performance since the unification can tailor the model for the classification dataset, making it vulnerable to the distribution shift from the dataset. In this work, we address the problem by disentangling the dataset bias using prefix tokens that inform a language encoder of the type of the input dataset (e.g., image-classification or caption) at training time. This approach allows the language encoder to share the knowledge from two datasets as well as switch the mode of feature extraction, i.e., image-classification dataset or image-caption dataset tailored mode, where we use image-caption mode in the zero-shot evaluation. Our method is generic and can be easily integrated into existing VL pre-training objectives such as CLIP or UniCL. In experiments, we show that this simple technique improves the performance in zero-shot image recognition accuracy and robustness to the image-level distribution shift.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 2, 2022

GPT Self-Supervision for a Better Data Annotator

The task of annotating data into concise summaries poses a significant challenge across various domains, frequently requiring the allocation of significant time and specialized knowledge by human experts. Despite existing efforts to use large language models for annotation tasks, significant problems such as limited applicability to unlabeled data, the absence of self-supervised methods, and the lack of focus on complex structured data still persist. In this work, we propose a GPT self-supervision annotation method, which embodies a generating-recovering paradigm that leverages the one-shot learning capabilities of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). The proposed approach comprises a one-shot tuning phase followed by a generation phase. In the one-shot tuning phase, we sample a data from the support set as part of the prompt for GPT to generate a textual summary, which is then used to recover the original data. The alignment score between the recovered and original data serves as a self-supervision navigator to refine the process. In the generation stage, the optimally selected one-shot sample serves as a template in the prompt and is applied to generating summaries from challenging datasets. The annotation performance is evaluated by tuning several human feedback reward networks and by calculating alignment scores between original and recovered data at both sentence and structure levels. Our self-supervised annotation method consistently achieves competitive scores, convincingly demonstrating its robust strength in various data-to-summary annotation tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

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.

  • 43 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024 2

MIDV-500: A Dataset for Identity Documents Analysis and Recognition on Mobile Devices in Video Stream

A lot of research has been devoted to identity documents analysis and recognition on mobile devices. However, no publicly available datasets designed for this particular problem currently exist. There are a few datasets which are useful for associated subtasks but in order to facilitate a more comprehensive scientific and technical approach to identity document recognition more specialized datasets are required. In this paper we present a Mobile Identity Document Video dataset (MIDV-500) consisting of 500 video clips for 50 different identity document types with ground truth which allows to perform research in a wide scope of document analysis problems. The paper presents characteristics of the dataset and evaluation results for existing methods of face detection, text line recognition, and document fields data extraction. Since an important feature of identity documents is their sensitiveness as they contain personal data, all source document images used in MIDV-500 are either in public domain or distributed under public copyright licenses. The main goal of this paper is to present a dataset. However, in addition and as a baseline, we present evaluation results for existing methods for face detection, text line recognition, and document data extraction, using the presented dataset. (The dataset is available for download at ftp://smartengines.com/midv-500/.)

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 16, 2018

AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework

A coreset is a tiny weighted subset of an input set, that closely resembles the loss function, with respect to a certain set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. While coreset research is an active research area, unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is usually suggested, a process that may take time or may be hard for new researchers in the field. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a ``plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. Full open source code can be found at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19, 2023

Add-One-In: Incremental Sample Selection for Large Language Models via a Choice-Based Greedy Paradigm

Selecting high-quality and diverse training samples from extensive datasets plays a crucial role in reducing training overhead and enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing studies fall short in assessing the overall value of selected data, focusing primarily on individual quality, and struggle to strike an effective balance between ensuring diversity and minimizing data point traversals. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel choice-based sample selection framework that shifts the focus from evaluating individual sample quality to comparing the contribution value of different samples when incorporated into the subset. Thanks to the advanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs, we utilize LLMs to evaluate the value of each option during the selection process. Furthermore, we design a greedy sampling process where samples are incrementally added to the subset, thereby improving efficiency by eliminating the need for exhaustive traversal of the entire dataset with the limited budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that selected data from our method not only surpass the performance of the full dataset but also achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art (SOTA) studies, while requiring fewer selections. Moreover, we validate our approach on a larger medical dataset, highlighting its practical applicability in real-world applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 4

T-JEPA: Augmentation-Free Self-Supervised Learning for Tabular Data

Self-supervision is often used for pre-training to foster performance on a downstream task by constructing meaningful representations of samples. Self-supervised learning (SSL) generally involves generating different views of the same sample and thus requires data augmentations that are challenging to construct for tabular data. This constitutes one of the main challenges of self-supervision for structured data. In the present work, we propose a novel augmentation-free SSL method for tabular data. Our approach, T-JEPA, relies on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and is akin to mask reconstruction in the latent space. It involves predicting the latent representation of one subset of features from the latent representation of a different subset within the same sample, thereby learning rich representations without augmentations. We use our method as a pre-training technique and train several deep classifiers on the obtained representation. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both classification and regression tasks, outperforming models trained directly on samples in their original data space. Moreover, T-JEPA enables some methods to consistently outperform or match the performance of traditional methods likes Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. To understand why, we extensively characterize the obtained representations and show that T-JEPA effectively identifies relevant features for downstream tasks without access to the labels. Additionally, we introduce regularization tokens, a novel regularization method critical for training of JEPA-based models on structured data.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

SSL4Eco: A Global Seasonal Dataset for Geospatial Foundation Models in Ecology

With the exacerbation of the biodiversity and climate crises, macroecological pursuits such as global biodiversity mapping become more urgent. Remote sensing offers a wealth of Earth observation data for ecological studies, but the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a major challenge. Recently, self-supervised learning has enabled learning representations from unlabeled data, triggering the development of pretrained geospatial models with generalizable features. However, these models are often trained on datasets biased toward areas of high human activity, leaving entire ecological regions underrepresented. Additionally, while some datasets attempt to address seasonality through multi-date imagery, they typically follow calendar seasons rather than local phenological cycles. To better capture vegetation seasonality at a global scale, we propose a simple phenology-informed sampling strategy and introduce corresponding SSL4Eco, a multi-date Sentinel-2 dataset, on which we train an existing model with a season-contrastive objective. We compare representations learned from SSL4Eco against other datasets on diverse ecological downstream tasks and demonstrate that our straightforward sampling method consistently improves representation quality, highlighting the importance of dataset construction. The model pretrained on SSL4Eco reaches state of the art performance on 7 out of 8 downstream tasks spanning (multi-label) classification and regression. We release our code, data, and model weights to support macroecological and computer vision research at https://github.com/PlekhanovaElena/ssl4eco.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 25

ScanBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Figure Extraction from Scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We focus on electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), aiming to improve access and expand their utility, since more than 6 million are publicly available, and they constitute an important corpus to aid research and education across disciplines. The corpus is growing as new born-digital documents are included, and since millions of older theses and dissertations have been converted to digital form to be disseminated electronically in institutional repositories. In ETDs, as with other scholarly works, figures and tables can communicate a large amount of information in a concise way. Although methods have been proposed for extracting figures and tables from born-digital PDFs, they do not work well with scanned ETDs. Considering this problem, our assessment of state-of-the-art figure extraction systems is that the reason they do not function well on scanned PDFs is that they have only been trained on born-digital documents. To address this limitation, we present ScanBank, a new dataset containing 10 thousand scanned page images, manually labeled by humans as to the presence of the 3.3 thousand figures or tables found therein. We use this dataset to train a deep neural network model based on YOLOv5 to accurately extract figures and tables from scanned ETDs. We pose and answer important research questions aimed at finding better methods for figure extraction from scanned documents. One of those concerns the value for training, of data augmentation techniques applied to born-digital documents which are used to train models better suited for figure extraction from scanned documents. To the best of our knowledge, ScanBank is the first manually annotated dataset for figure and table extraction for scanned ETDs. A YOLOv5-based model, trained on ScanBank, outperforms existing comparable open-source and freely available baseline methods by a considerable margin.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 23, 2021

MEDIC: A Multi-Task Learning Dataset for Disaster Image Classification

Recent research in disaster informatics demonstrates a practical and important use case of artificial intelligence to save human lives and suffering during natural disasters based on social media contents (text and images). While notable progress has been made using texts, research on exploiting the images remains relatively under-explored. To advance image-based approaches, we propose MEDIC (Available at: https://crisisnlp.qcri.org/medic/index.html), which is the largest social media image classification dataset for humanitarian response consisting of 71,198 images to address four different tasks in a multi-task learning setup. This is the first dataset of its kind: social media images, disaster response, and multi-task learning research. An important property of this dataset is its high potential to facilitate research on multi-task learning, which recently receives much interest from the machine learning community and has shown remarkable results in terms of memory, inference speed, performance, and generalization capability. Therefore, the proposed dataset is an important resource for advancing image-based disaster management and multi-task machine learning research. We experiment with different deep learning architectures and report promising results, which are above the majority baselines for all tasks. Along with the dataset, we also release all relevant scripts (https://github.com/firojalam/medic).

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 29, 2021

CycleResearcher: Improving Automated Research via Automated Review

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper revision. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves a 26.89\% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) over individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating that LLMs can surpass expert-level performance in research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, surpassing the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts and approaching the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and advancing AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at http://github/minjun-zhu/Researcher.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024