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Jun 6

Positive Label Is All You Need for Multi-Label Classification

Multi-label classification (MLC) suffers from the inevitable label noise in training data due to the difficulty in annotating various semantic labels in each image. To mitigate the influence of noisy labels, existing methods mainly devote to identifying and correcting the label mistakes via a trained MLC model. However, these methods still involve annoying noisy labels in training, which can result in imprecise recognition of noisy labels and weaken the performance. In this paper, considering that the negative labels are substantially more than positive labels, and most noisy labels are from the negative labels, we directly discard all the negative labels in the dataset, and propose a new method dubbed positive and unlabeled multi-label classification (PU-MLC). By extending positive-unlabeled learning into MLC task, our method trains model with only positive labels and unlabeled data, and introduces adaptive re-balance factor and adaptive temperature coefficient in the loss function to alleviate the catastrophic imbalance in label distribution and over-smoothing of probabilities in training. Furthermore, to capture both local and global dependencies in the image, we also introduce a local-global convolution module, which supplements global information into existing convolution layers with no retraining of backbone required. Our PU-MLC is simple and effective, and it is applicable to both MLC and MLC with partial labels (MLC-PL) tasks. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets demonstrate that our PU-MLC achieves significantly improvements on both MLC and MLC-PL settings with even fewer annotations. Code will be released.

ELA: Efficient Local Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.

Mamba YOLO: SSMs-Based YOLO For Object Detection

Propelled by the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, the YOLO series has set a new benchmark for real-time object detectors. Researchers have continuously explored innovative applications of reparameterization, efficient layer aggregation networks, and anchor-free techniques on the foundation of YOLO. To further enhance detection performance, Transformer-based structures have been introduced, significantly expanding the model's receptive field and achieving notable performance gains. However, such improvements come at a cost, as the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism increases the computational burden of the model. Fortunately, the emergence of State Space Models (SSM) as an innovative technology has effectively mitigated the issues caused by quadratic complexity. In light of these advancements, we introduce Mamba-YOLO a novel object detection model based on SSM. Mamba-YOLO not only optimizes the SSM foundation but also adapts specifically for object detection tasks. Given the potential limitations of SSM in sequence modeling, such as insufficient receptive field and weak image locality, we have designed the LSBlock and RGBlock. These modules enable more precise capture of local image dependencies and significantly enhance the robustness of the model. Extensive experimental results on the publicly available benchmark datasets COCO and VOC demonstrate that Mamba-YOLO surpasses the existing YOLO series models in both performance and competitiveness, showcasing its substantial potential and competitive edge.The PyTorch code is available at:https://github.com/HZAI-ZJNU/Mamba-YOLO

Is Heuristic Sampling Necessary in Training Deep Object Detectors?

To train accurate deep object detectors under the extreme foreground-background imbalance, heuristic sampling methods are always necessary, which either re-sample a subset of all training samples (hard sampling methods, \eg biased sampling, OHEM), or use all training samples but re-weight them discriminatively (soft sampling methods, \eg Focal Loss, GHM). In this paper, we challenge the necessity of such hard/soft sampling methods for training accurate deep object detectors. While previous studies have shown that training detectors without heuristic sampling methods would significantly degrade accuracy, we reveal that this degradation comes from an unreasonable classification gradient magnitude caused by the imbalance, rather than a lack of re-sampling/re-weighting. Motivated by our discovery, we propose a simple yet effective Sampling-Free mechanism to achieve a reasonable classification gradient magnitude by initialization and loss scaling. Unlike heuristic sampling methods with multiple hyperparameters, our Sampling-Free mechanism is fully data diagnostic, without laborious hyperparameters searching. We verify the effectiveness of our method in training anchor-based and anchor-free object detectors, where our method always achieves higher detection accuracy than heuristic sampling methods on COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Our Sampling-Free mechanism provides a new perspective to address the foreground-background imbalance. Our code is released at https://github.com/ChenJoya/sampling-free.

Towards Foundational Models for Molecular Learning on Large-Scale Multi-Task Datasets

Recently, pre-trained foundation models have enabled significant advancements in multiple fields. In molecular machine learning, however, where datasets are often hand-curated, and hence typically small, the lack of datasets with labeled features, and codebases to manage those datasets, has hindered the development of foundation models. In this work, we present seven novel datasets categorized by size into three distinct categories: ToyMix, LargeMix and UltraLarge. These datasets push the boundaries in both the scale and the diversity of supervised labels for molecular learning. They cover nearly 100 million molecules and over 3000 sparsely defined tasks, totaling more than 13 billion individual labels of both quantum and biological nature. In comparison, our datasets contain 300 times more data points than the widely used OGB-LSC PCQM4Mv2 dataset, and 13 times more than the quantum-only QM1B dataset. In addition, to support the development of foundational models based on our proposed datasets, we present the Graphium graph machine learning library which simplifies the process of building and training molecular machine learning models for multi-task and multi-level molecular datasets. Finally, we present a range of baseline results as a starting point of multi-task and multi-level training on these datasets. Empirically, we observe that performance on low-resource biological datasets show improvement by also training on large amounts of quantum data. This indicates that there may be potential in multi-task and multi-level training of a foundation model and fine-tuning it to resource-constrained downstream tasks.

Token Contrast for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) using image-level labels typically utilizes Class Activation Map (CAM) to generate the pseudo labels. Limited by the local structure perception of CNN, CAM usually cannot identify the integral object regions. Though the recent Vision Transformer (ViT) can remedy this flaw, we observe it also brings the over-smoothing issue, \ie, the final patch tokens incline to be uniform. In this work, we propose Token Contrast (ToCo) to address this issue and further explore the virtue of ViT for WSSS. Firstly, motivated by the observation that intermediate layers in ViT can still retain semantic diversity, we designed a Patch Token Contrast module (PTC). PTC supervises the final patch tokens with the pseudo token relations derived from intermediate layers, allowing them to align the semantic regions and thus yield more accurate CAM. Secondly, to further differentiate the low-confidence regions in CAM, we devised a Class Token Contrast module (CTC) inspired by the fact that class tokens in ViT can capture high-level semantics. CTC facilitates the representation consistency between uncertain local regions and global objects by contrasting their class tokens. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets show the proposed ToCo can remarkably surpass other single-stage competitors and achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Code is available at https://github.com/rulixiang/ToCo.

Chasing Day and Night: Towards Robust and Efficient All-Day Object Detection Guided by an Event Camera

The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/

DiffusionEngine: Diffusion Model is Scalable Data Engine for Object Detection

Data is the cornerstone of deep learning. This paper reveals that the recently developed Diffusion Model is a scalable data engine for object detection. Existing methods for scaling up detection-oriented data often require manual collection or generative models to obtain target images, followed by data augmentation and labeling to produce training pairs, which are costly, complex, or lacking diversity. To address these issues, we presentDiffusionEngine (DE), a data scaling-up engine that provides high-quality detection-oriented training pairs in a single stage. DE consists of a pre-trained diffusion model and an effective Detection-Adapter, contributing to generating scalable, diverse and generalizable detection data in a plug-and-play manner. Detection-Adapter is learned to align the implicit semantic and location knowledge in off-the-shelf diffusion models with detection-aware signals to make better bounding-box predictions. Additionally, we contribute two datasets, i.e., COCO-DE and VOC-DE, to scale up existing detection benchmarks for facilitating follow-up research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that data scaling-up via DE can achieve significant improvements in diverse scenarios, such as various detection algorithms, self-supervised pre-training, data-sparse, label-scarce, cross-domain, and semi-supervised learning. For example, when using DE with a DINO-based adapter to scale up data, mAP is improved by 3.1% on COCO, 7.6% on VOC, and 11.5% on Clipart.

Towards Training-free Open-world Segmentation via Image Prompt Foundation Models

The realm of computer vision has witnessed a paradigm shift with the advent of foundational models, mirroring the transformative influence of large language models in the domain of natural language processing. This paper delves into the exploration of open-world segmentation, presenting a novel approach called Image Prompt Segmentation (IPSeg) that harnesses the power of vision foundational models. IPSeg lies the principle of a training-free paradigm, which capitalizes on image prompt techniques. Specifically, IPSeg utilizes a single image containing a subjective visual concept as a flexible prompt to query vision foundation models like DINOv2 and Stable Diffusion. Our approach extracts robust features for the prompt image and input image, then matches the input representations to the prompt representations via a novel feature interaction module to generate point prompts highlighting target objects in the input image. The generated point prompts are further utilized to guide the Segment Anything Model to segment the target object in the input image. The proposed method stands out by eliminating the need for exhaustive training sessions, thereby offering a more efficient and scalable solution. Experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and other datasets demonstrate IPSeg's efficacy for flexible open-world segmentation using intuitive image prompts. This work pioneers tapping foundation models for open-world understanding through visual concepts conveyed in images.

Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation

We aim at advancing open-vocabulary object detection, which detects objects described by arbitrary text inputs. The fundamental challenge is the availability of training data. It is costly to further scale up the number of classes contained in existing object detection datasets. To overcome this challenge, we propose ViLD, a training method via Vision and Language knowledge Distillation. Our method distills the knowledge from a pretrained open-vocabulary image classification model (teacher) into a two-stage detector (student). Specifically, we use the teacher model to encode category texts and image regions of object proposals. Then we train a student detector, whose region embeddings of detected boxes are aligned with the text and image embeddings inferred by the teacher. We benchmark on LVIS by holding out all rare categories as novel categories that are not seen during training. ViLD obtains 16.1 mask AP_r with a ResNet-50 backbone, even outperforming the supervised counterpart by 3.8. When trained with a stronger teacher model ALIGN, ViLD achieves 26.3 AP_r. The model can directly transfer to other datasets without finetuning, achieving 72.2 AP_{50} on PASCAL VOC, 36.6 AP on COCO and 11.8 AP on Objects365. On COCO, ViLD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.8 on novel AP and 11.4 on overall AP. Code and demo are open-sourced at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection/projects/vild.

SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector

We present a method for detecting objects in images using a single deep neural network. Our approach, named SSD, discretizes the output space of bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over different aspect ratios and scales per feature map location. At prediction time, the network generates scores for the presence of each object category in each default box and produces adjustments to the box to better match the object shape. Additionally, the network combines predictions from multiple feature maps with different resolutions to naturally handle objects of various sizes. Our SSD model is simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stage and encapsulates all computation in a single network. This makes SSD easy to train and straightforward to integrate into systems that require a detection component. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and ILSVRC datasets confirm that SSD has comparable accuracy to methods that utilize an additional object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework for both training and inference. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD has much better accuracy, even with a smaller input image size. For 300times 300 input, SSD achieves 72.1% mAP on VOC2007 test at 58 FPS on a Nvidia Titan X and for 500times 500 input, SSD achieves 75.1% mAP, outperforming a comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Code is available at https://github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/ssd .

P2Seg: Pointly-supervised Segmentation via Mutual Distillation

Point-level Supervised Instance Segmentation (PSIS) aims to enhance the applicability and scalability of instance segmentation by utilizing low-cost yet instance-informative annotations. Existing PSIS methods usually rely on positional information to distinguish objects, but predicting precise boundaries remains challenging due to the lack of contour annotations. Nevertheless, weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods are proficient in utilizing intra-class feature consistency to capture the boundary contours of the same semantic regions. In this paper, we design a Mutual Distillation Module (MDM) to leverage the complementary strengths of both instance position and semantic information and achieve accurate instance-level object perception. The MDM consists of Semantic to Instance (S2I) and Instance to Semantic (I2S). S2I is guided by the precise boundaries of semantic regions to learn the association between annotated points and instance contours. I2S leverages discriminative relationships between instances to facilitate the differentiation of various objects within the semantic map. Extensive experiments substantiate the efficacy of MDM in fostering the synergy between instance and semantic information, consequently improving the quality of instance-level object representations. Our method achieves 55.7 mAP_{50} and 17.6 mAP on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, significantly outperforming recent PSIS methods and several box-supervised instance segmentation competitors.

Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code

Non-maximum suppression is an integral part of the object detection pipeline. First, it sorts all detection boxes on the basis of their scores. The detection box M with the maximum score is selected and all other detection boxes with a significant overlap (using a pre-defined threshold) with M are suppressed. This process is recursively applied on the remaining boxes. As per the design of the algorithm, if an object lies within the predefined overlap threshold, it leads to a miss. To this end, we propose Soft-NMS, an algorithm which decays the detection scores of all other objects as a continuous function of their overlap with M. Hence, no object is eliminated in this process. Soft-NMS obtains consistent improvements for the coco-style mAP metric on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC 2007 (1.7% for both R-FCN and Faster-RCNN) and MS-COCO (1.3% for R-FCN and 1.1% for Faster-RCNN) by just changing the NMS algorithm without any additional hyper-parameters. Using Deformable-RFCN, Soft-NMS improves state-of-the-art in object detection from 39.8% to 40.9% with a single model. Further, the computational complexity of Soft-NMS is the same as traditional NMS and hence it can be efficiently implemented. Since Soft-NMS does not require any extra training and is simple to implement, it can be easily integrated into any object detection pipeline. Code for Soft-NMS is publicly available on GitHub (http://bit.ly/2nJLNMu).

SMILe: Leveraging Submodular Mutual Information For Robust Few-Shot Object Detection

Confusion and forgetting of object classes have been challenges of prime interest in Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). To overcome these pitfalls in metric learning based FSOD techniques, we introduce a novel Submodular Mutual Information Learning (SMILe) framework which adopts combinatorial mutual information functions to enforce the creation of tighter and discriminative feature clusters in FSOD. Our proposed approach generalizes to several existing approaches in FSOD, agnostic of the backbone architecture demonstrating elevated performance gains. A paradigm shift from instance based objective functions to combinatorial objectives in SMILe naturally preserves the diversity within an object class resulting in reduced forgetting when subjected to few training examples. Furthermore, the application of mutual information between the already learnt (base) and newly added (novel) objects ensures sufficient separation between base and novel classes, minimizing the effect of class confusion. Experiments on popular FSOD benchmarks, PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO show that our approach generalizes to State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches improving their novel class performance by up to 5.7% (3.3 mAP points) and 5.4% (2.6 mAP points) on the 10-shot setting of VOC (split 3) and 30-shot setting of COCO datasets respectively. Our experiments also demonstrate better retention of base class performance and up to 2x faster convergence over existing approaches agnostic of the underlying architecture.

Background Adaptation with Residual Modeling for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Class Incremental Semantic Segmentation~(CISS), within Incremental Learning for semantic segmentation, targets segmenting new categories while reducing the catastrophic forgetting on the old categories.Besides, background shifting, where the background category changes constantly in each step, is a special challenge for CISS. Current methods with a shared background classifier struggle to keep up with these changes, leading to decreased stability in background predictions and reduced accuracy of segmentation. For this special challenge, we designed a novel background adaptation mechanism, which explicitly models the background residual rather than the background itself in each step, and aggregates these residuals to represent the evolving background. Therefore, the background adaptation mechanism ensures the stability of previous background classifiers, while enabling the model to concentrate on the easy-learned residuals from the additional channel, which enhances background discernment for better prediction of novel categories. To precisely optimize the background adaptation mechanism, we propose Pseudo Background Binary Cross-Entropy loss and Background Adaptation losses, which amplify the adaptation effect. Group Knowledge Distillation and Background Feature Distillation strategies are designed to prevent forgetting old categories. Our approach, evaluated across various incremental scenarios on Pascal VOC 2012 and ADE20K datasets, outperforms prior exemplar-free state-of-the-art methods with mIoU of 3.0% in VOC 10-1 and 2.0% in ADE 100-5, notably enhancing the accuracy of new classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Code is available in https://andyzaq.github.io/barmsite/.

DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs

In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First, we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or 'atrous convolution', as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second, we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third, we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed "DeepLab" system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7% mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.

Exploring Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation without Human Labels

Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in computer vision that involves segmenting images into semantically meaningful regions at the pixel level. However, existing approaches often rely on expensive human annotations as supervision for model training, limiting their scalability to large, unlabeled datasets. To address this challenge, we present ZeroSeg, a novel method that leverages the existing pretrained vision-language (VL) model (e.g. CLIP) to train open-vocabulary zero-shot semantic segmentation models. Although acquired extensive knowledge of visual concepts, it is non-trivial to exploit knowledge from these VL models to the task of semantic segmentation, as they are usually trained at an image level. ZeroSeg overcomes this by distilling the visual concepts learned by VL models into a set of segment tokens, each summarizing a localized region of the target image. We evaluate ZeroSeg on multiple popular segmentation benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL Context, and COCO, in a zero-shot manner (i.e., no training or adaption on target segmentation datasets). Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared to other zero-shot segmentation methods under the same training data, while also performing competitively compared to strongly supervised methods. Finally, we also demonstrated the effectiveness of ZeroSeg on open-vocabulary segmentation, through both human studies and qualitative visualizations.

SAM-CLIP: Merging Vision Foundation Models towards Semantic and Spatial Understanding

The landscape of publicly available vision foundation models (VFMs), such as CLIP and Segment Anything Model (SAM), is expanding rapidly. VFMs are endowed with distinct capabilities stemming from their pre-training objectives. For instance, CLIP excels in semantic understanding, while SAM specializes in spatial understanding for segmentation. In this work, we introduce a simple recipe to efficiently merge VFMs into a unified model that assimilates their expertise. Our proposed method integrates multi-task learning, continual learning techniques, and teacher-student distillation. This strategy entails significantly less computational cost compared to traditional multi-task training from scratch. Additionally, it only demands a small fraction of the pre-training datasets that were initially used to train individual models. By applying our method to SAM and CLIP, we derive SAM-CLIP: a unified model that amalgamates the strengths of SAM and CLIP into a single backbone, making it apt for edge device applications. We show that SAM-CLIP learns richer visual representations, equipped with both localization and semantic features, suitable for a broad range of vision tasks. SAM-CLIP obtains improved performance on several head probing tasks when compared with SAM and CLIP. We further show that SAM-CLIP not only retains the foundational strengths of its precursor models but also introduces synergistic functionalities, most notably in zero-shot semantic segmentation, where SAM-CLIP establishes new state-of-the-art results on 5 benchmarks. It outperforms previous models that are specifically designed for this task by a large margin, including +6.8% and +5.9% mean IoU improvement on Pascal-VOC and COCO-Stuff datasets, respectively.

Make a Strong Teacher with Label Assistance: A Novel Knowledge Distillation Approach for Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a novel knowledge distillation approach for the semantic segmentation task. Unlike previous methods that rely on power-trained teachers or other modalities to provide additional knowledge, our approach does not require complex teacher models or information from extra sensors. Specifically, for the teacher model training, we propose to noise the label and then incorporate it into input to effectively boost the lightweight teacher performance. To ensure the robustness of the teacher model against the introduced noise, we propose a dual-path consistency training strategy featuring a distance loss between the outputs of two paths. For the student model training, we keep it consistent with the standard distillation for simplicity. Our approach not only boosts the efficacy of knowledge distillation but also increases the flexibility in selecting teacher and student models. To demonstrate the advantages of our Label Assisted Distillation (LAD) method, we conduct extensive experiments on five challenging datasets including Cityscapes, ADE20K, PASCAL-VOC, COCO-Stuff 10K, and COCO-Stuff 164K, five popular models: FCN, PSPNet, DeepLabV3, STDC, and OCRNet, and results show the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. We posit that incorporating labels into the input, as demonstrated in our work, will provide valuable insights into related fields. Code is available at https://github.com/skyshoumeng/Label_Assisted_Distillation.

Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised object localization and semantic segmentation aim to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve pixel-level localization. While existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of the generator, this paper presents two astonishing experimental observations on the object localization learning process: For a trained network, as the foreground mask expands, 1) the cross-entropy converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. 2) The activation value continuously increases until the foreground mask expands to the object boundary. Therefore, to achieve a more effective localization performance, we argue for the usage of activation value to learn more object regions. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint (AMC) module is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using foreground region guidance and area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. In addition, our method also achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised semantic segmentation performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS-Extension.

Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model

Recently, vision-language pre-training shows great potential in open-vocabulary object detection, where detectors trained on base classes are devised for detecting new classes. The class text embedding is firstly generated by feeding prompts to the text encoder of a pre-trained vision-language model. It is then used as the region classifier to supervise the training of a detector. The key element that leads to the success of this model is the proper prompt, which requires careful words tuning and ingenious design. To avoid laborious prompt engineering, there are some prompt representation learning methods being proposed for the image classification task, which however can only be sub-optimal solutions when applied to the detection task. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, detection prompt (DetPro), to learn continuous prompt representations for open-vocabulary object detection based on the pre-trained vision-language model. Different from the previous classification-oriented methods, DetPro has two highlights: 1) a background interpretation scheme to include the proposals in image background into the prompt training; 2) a context grading scheme to separate proposals in image foreground for tailored prompt training. We assemble DetPro with ViLD, a recent state-of-the-art open-world object detector, and conduct experiments on the LVIS as well as transfer learning on the Pascal VOC, COCO, Objects365 datasets. Experimental results show that our DetPro outperforms the baseline ViLD in all settings, e.g., +3.4 APbox and +3.0 APmask improvements on the novel classes of LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dyabel/detpro.

GemNet-OC: Developing Graph Neural Networks for Large and Diverse Molecular Simulation Datasets

Recent years have seen the advent of molecular simulation datasets that are orders of magnitude larger and more diverse. These new datasets differ substantially in four aspects of complexity: 1. Chemical diversity (number of different elements), 2. system size (number of atoms per sample), 3. dataset size (number of data samples), and 4. domain shift (similarity of the training and test set). Despite these large differences, benchmarks on small and narrow datasets remain the predominant method of demonstrating progress in graph neural networks (GNNs) for molecular simulation, likely due to cheaper training compute requirements. This raises the question -- does GNN progress on small and narrow datasets translate to these more complex datasets? This work investigates this question by first developing the GemNet-OC model based on the large Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset. GemNet-OC outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on OC20 by 16% while reducing training time by a factor of 10. We then compare the impact of 18 model components and hyperparameter choices on performance in multiple datasets. We find that the resulting model would be drastically different depending on the dataset used for making model choices. To isolate the source of this discrepancy we study six subsets of the OC20 dataset that individually test each of the above-mentioned four dataset aspects. We find that results on the OC-2M subset correlate well with the full OC20 dataset while being substantially cheaper to train on. Our findings challenge the common practice of developing GNNs solely on small datasets, but highlight ways of achieving fast development cycles and generalizable results via moderately-sized, representative datasets such as OC-2M and efficient models such as GemNet-OC. Our code and pretrained model weights are open-sourced.

The Open DAC 2023 Dataset and Challenges for Sorbent Discovery in Direct Air Capture

New methods for carbon dioxide removal are urgently needed to combat global climate change. Direct air capture (DAC) is an emerging technology to capture carbon dioxide directly from ambient air. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been widely studied as potentially customizable adsorbents for DAC. However, discovering promising MOF sorbents for DAC is challenging because of the vast chemical space to explore and the need to understand materials as functions of humidity and temperature. We explore a computational approach benefiting from recent innovations in machine learning (ML) and present a dataset named Open DAC 2023 (ODAC23) consisting of more than 38M density functional theory (DFT) calculations on more than 8,400 MOF materials containing adsorbed CO_2 and/or H_2O. ODAC23 is by far the largest dataset of MOF adsorption calculations at the DFT level of accuracy currently available. In addition to probing properties of adsorbed molecules, the dataset is a rich source of information on structural relaxation of MOFs, which will be useful in many contexts beyond specific applications for DAC. A large number of MOFs with promising properties for DAC are identified directly in ODAC23. We also trained state-of-the-art ML models on this dataset to approximate calculations at the DFT level. This open-source dataset and our initial ML models will provide an important baseline for future efforts to identify MOFs for a wide range of applications, including DAC.

The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges

Catalyst discovery and optimization is key to solving many societal and energy challenges including solar fuels synthesis, long-term energy storage, and renewable fertilizer production. Despite considerable effort by the catalysis community to apply machine learning models to the computational catalyst discovery process, it remains an open challenge to build models that can generalize across both elemental compositions of surfaces and adsorbate identity/configurations, perhaps because datasets have been smaller in catalysis than related fields. To address this we developed the OC20 dataset, consisting of 1,281,040 Density Functional Theory (DFT) relaxations (~264,890,000 single point evaluations) across a wide swath of materials, surfaces, and adsorbates (nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistries). We supplemented this dataset with randomly perturbed structures, short timescale molecular dynamics, and electronic structure analyses. The dataset comprises three central tasks indicative of day-to-day catalyst modeling and comes with pre-defined train/validation/test splits to facilitate direct comparisons with future model development efforts. We applied three state-of-the-art graph neural network models (CGCNN, SchNet, Dimenet++) to each of these tasks as baseline demonstrations for the community to build on. In almost every task, no upper limit on model size was identified, suggesting that even larger models are likely to improve on initial results. The dataset and baseline models are both provided as open resources, as well as a public leader board to encourage community contributions to solve these important tasks.

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/.)

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.

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.

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.

WIT-UAS: A Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal Dataset to Detect Crew Assets From Aerial Views

We present the Wildland-fire Infrared Thermal (WIT-UAS) dataset for long-wave infrared sensing of crew and vehicle assets amidst prescribed wildland fire environments. While such a dataset is crucial for safety monitoring in wildland fire applications, to the authors' awareness, no such dataset focusing on assets near fire is publicly available. Presumably, this is due to the barrier to entry of collaborating with fire management personnel. We present two related data subsets: WIT-UAS-ROS consists of full ROS bag files containing sensor and robot data of UAS flight over the fire, and WIT-UAS-Image contains hand-labeled long-wave infrared (LWIR) images extracted from WIT-UAS-ROS. Our dataset is the first to focus on asset detection in a wildland fire environment. We show that thermal detection models trained without fire data frequently detect false positives by classifying fire as people. By adding our dataset to training, we show that the false positive rate is reduced significantly. Yet asset detection in wildland fire environments is still significantly more challenging than detection in urban environments, due to dense obscuring trees, greater heat variation, and overbearing thermal signal of the fire. We publicize this dataset to encourage the community to study more advanced models to tackle this challenging environment. The dataset, code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/castacks/WIT-UAS-Dataset.

PCB-Vision: A Multiscene RGB-Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset of Printed Circuit Boards

Addressing the critical theme of recycling electronic waste (E-waste), this contribution is dedicated to developing advanced automated data processing pipelines as a basis for decision-making and process control. Aligning with the broader goals of the circular economy and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), our work leverages non-invasive analysis methods utilizing RGB and hyperspectral imaging data to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into the E-waste stream composition for optimizing recycling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce 'PCB-Vision'; a pioneering RGB-hyperspectral printed circuit board (PCB) benchmark dataset, comprising 53 RGB images of high spatial resolution paired with their corresponding high spectral resolution hyperspectral data cubes in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) range. Grounded in open science principles, our dataset provides a comprehensive resource for researchers through high-quality ground truths, focusing on three primary PCB components: integrated circuits (IC), capacitors, and connectors. We provide extensive statistical investigations on the proposed dataset together with the performance of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Residual U-Net, LinkNet, and DeepLabv3+. By openly sharing this multi-scene benchmark dataset along with the baseline codes, we hope to foster transparent, traceable, and comparable developments of advanced data processing across various scientific communities, including, but not limited to, computer vision and remote sensing. Emphasizing our commitment to supporting a collaborative and inclusive scientific community, all materials, including code, data, ground truth, and masks, will be accessible at https://github.com/hifexplo/PCBVision.

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.

WxC-Bench: A Novel Dataset for Weather and Climate Downstream Tasks

High-quality machine learning (ML)-ready datasets play a foundational role in developing new artificial intelligence (AI) models or fine-tuning existing models for scientific applications such as weather and climate analysis. Unfortunately, despite the growing development of new deep learning models for weather and climate, there is a scarcity of curated, pre-processed machine learning (ML)-ready datasets. Curating such high-quality datasets for developing new models is challenging particularly because the modality of the input data varies significantly for different downstream tasks addressing different atmospheric scales (spatial and temporal). Here we introduce WxC-Bench (Weather and Climate Bench), a multi-modal dataset designed to support the development of generalizable AI models for downstream use-cases in weather and climate research. WxC-Bench is designed as a dataset of datasets for developing ML-models for a complex weather and climate system, addressing selected downstream tasks as machine learning phenomenon. WxC-Bench encompasses several atmospheric processes from meso-beta (20 - 200 km) scale to synoptic scales (2500 km), such as aviation turbulence, hurricane intensity and track monitoring, weather analog search, gravity wave parameterization, and natural language report generation. We provide a comprehensive description of the dataset and also present a technical validation for baseline analysis. The dataset and code to prepare the ML-ready data have been made publicly available on Hugging Face -- https://huggingface.co/datasets/nasa-impact/WxC-Bench

SLUE: New Benchmark Tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation on Natural Speech

Progress in speech processing has been facilitated by shared datasets and benchmarks. Historically these have focused on automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, or other lower-level tasks. Interest has been growing in higher-level spoken language understanding tasks, including using end-to-end models, but there are fewer annotated datasets for such tasks. At the same time, recent work shows the possibility of pre-training generic representations and then fine-tuning for several tasks using relatively little labeled data. We propose to create a suite of benchmark tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) consisting of limited-size labeled training sets and corresponding evaluation sets. This resource would allow the research community to track progress, evaluate pre-trained representations for higher-level tasks, and study open questions such as the utility of pipeline versus end-to-end approaches. We present the first phase of the SLUE benchmark suite, consisting of named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and ASR on the corresponding datasets. We focus on naturally produced (not read or synthesized) speech, and freely available datasets. We provide new transcriptions and annotations on subsets of the VoxCeleb and VoxPopuli datasets, evaluation metrics and results for baseline models, and an open-source toolkit to reproduce the baselines and evaluate new models.

STARSS22: A dataset of spatial recordings of real scenes with spatiotemporal annotations of sound events

This report presents the Sony-TAu Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2022 (STARS22) dataset for sound event localization and detection, comprised of spatial recordings of real scenes collected in various interiors of two different sites. The dataset is captured with a high resolution spherical microphone array and delivered in two 4-channel formats, first-order Ambisonics and tetrahedral microphone array. Sound events in the dataset belonging to 13 target sound classes are annotated both temporally and spatially through a combination of human annotation and optical tracking. The dataset serves as the development and evaluation dataset for the Task 3 of the DCASE2022 Challenge on Sound Event Localization and Detection and introduces significant new challenges for the task compared to the previous iterations, which were based on synthetic spatialized sound scene recordings. Dataset specifications are detailed including recording and annotation process, target classes and their presence, and details on the development and evaluation splits. Additionally, the report presents the baseline system that accompanies the dataset in the challenge with emphasis on the differences with the baseline of the previous iterations; namely, introduction of the multi-ACCDOA representation to handle multiple simultaneous occurences of events of the same class, and support for additional improved input features for the microphone array format. Results of the baseline indicate that with a suitable training strategy a reasonable detection and localization performance can be achieved on real sound scene recordings. The dataset is available in https://zenodo.org/record/6387880.

VNHSGE: VietNamese High School Graduation Examination Dataset for Large Language Models

The VNHSGE (VietNamese High School Graduation Examination) dataset, developed exclusively for evaluating large language models (LLMs), is introduced in this article. The dataset, which covers nine subjects, was generated from the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination and comparable tests. 300 literary essays have been included, and there are over 19,000 multiple-choice questions on a range of topics. The dataset assesses LLMs in multitasking situations such as question answering, text generation, reading comprehension, visual question answering, and more by including both textual data and accompanying images. Using ChatGPT and BingChat, we evaluated LLMs on the VNHSGE dataset and contrasted their performance with that of Vietnamese students to see how well they performed. The results show that ChatGPT and BingChat both perform at a human level in a number of areas, including literature, English, history, geography, and civics education. They still have space to grow, though, especially in the areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. The VNHSGE dataset seeks to provide an adequate benchmark for assessing the abilities of LLMs with its wide-ranging coverage and variety of activities. We intend to promote future developments in the creation of LLMs by making this dataset available to the scientific community, especially in resolving LLMs' limits in disciplines involving mathematics and the natural sciences.

FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events

Most existing datasets for sound event recognition (SER) are relatively small and/or domain-specific, with the exception of AudioSet, based on over 2M tracks from YouTube videos and encompassing over 500 sound classes. However, AudioSet is not an open dataset as its official release consists of pre-computed audio features. Downloading the original audio tracks can be problematic due to YouTube videos gradually disappearing and usage rights issues. To provide an alternative benchmark dataset and thus foster SER research, we introduce FSD50K, an open dataset containing over 51k audio clips totalling over 100h of audio manually labeled using 200 classes drawn from the AudioSet Ontology. The audio clips are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, making the dataset freely distributable (including waveforms). We provide a detailed description of the FSD50K creation process, tailored to the particularities of Freesound data, including challenges encountered and solutions adopted. We include a comprehensive dataset characterization along with discussion of limitations and key factors to allow its audio-informed usage. Finally, we conduct sound event classification experiments to provide baseline systems as well as insight on the main factors to consider when splitting Freesound audio data for SER. Our goal is to develop a dataset to be widely adopted by the community as a new open benchmark for SER research.

TeleAntiFraud-28k: A Audio-Text Slow-Thinking Dataset for Telecom Fraud Detection

The detection of telecom fraud faces significant challenges due to the lack of high-quality multimodal training data that integrates audio signals with reasoning-oriented textual analysis. To address this gap, we present TeleAntiFraud-28k, the first open-source audio-text slow-thinking dataset specifically designed for automated telecom fraud analysis. Our dataset is constructed through three strategies: (1) Privacy-preserved text-truth sample generation using automatically speech recognition (ASR)-transcribed call recordings (with anonymized original audio), ensuring real-world consistency through text-to-speech (TTS) model regeneration; (2) Semantic enhancement via large language model (LLM)-based self-instruction sampling on authentic ASR outputs to expand scenario coverage; (3) Multi-agent adversarial synthesis that simulates emerging fraud tactics through predefined communication scenarios and fraud typologies. The generated dataset contains 28,511 rigorously processed speech-text pairs, complete with detailed annotations for fraud reasoning. The dataset is divided into three tasks: scenario classification, fraud detection, fraud type classification. Furthermore, we construct TeleAntiFraud-Bench, a standardized evaluation benchmark comprising proportionally sampled instances from the dataset, to facilitate systematic testing of model performance on telecom fraud detection tasks. We also contribute a production-optimized supervised fine-tuning (SFT) model trained on hybrid real/synthetic data, while open-sourcing the data processing framework to enable community-driven dataset expansion. This work establishes a foundational framework for multimodal anti-fraud research while addressing critical challenges in data privacy and scenario diversity. The project will be released at https://github.com/JimmyMa99/TeleAntiFraud.

HumBugDB: A Large-scale Acoustic Mosquito Dataset

This paper presents the first large-scale multi-species dataset of acoustic recordings of mosquitoes tracked continuously in free flight. We present 20 hours of audio recordings that we have expertly labelled and tagged precisely in time. Significantly, 18 hours of recordings contain annotations from 36 different species. Mosquitoes are well-known carriers of diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever. Collecting this dataset is motivated by the need to assist applications which utilise mosquito acoustics to conduct surveys to help predict outbreaks and inform intervention policy. The task of detecting mosquitoes from the sound of their wingbeats is challenging due to the difficulty in collecting recordings from realistic scenarios. To address this, as part of the HumBug project, we conducted global experiments to record mosquitoes ranging from those bred in culture cages to mosquitoes captured in the wild. Consequently, the audio recordings vary in signal-to-noise ratio and contain a broad range of indoor and outdoor background environments from Tanzania, Thailand, Kenya, the USA and the UK. In this paper we describe in detail how we collected, labelled and curated the data. The data is provided from a PostgreSQL database, which contains important metadata such as the capture method, age, feeding status and gender of the mosquitoes. Additionally, we provide code to extract features and train Bayesian convolutional neural networks for two key tasks: the identification of mosquitoes from their corresponding background environments, and the classification of detected mosquitoes into species. Our extensive dataset is both challenging to machine learning researchers focusing on acoustic identification, and critical to entomologists, geo-spatial modellers and other domain experts to understand mosquito behaviour, model their distribution, and manage the threat they pose to humans.

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/.

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.

HyperspectralViTs: General Hyperspectral Models for On-board Remote Sensing

On-board processing of hyperspectral data with machine learning models would enable unprecedented amount of autonomy for a wide range of tasks, for example methane detection or mineral identification. This can enable early warning system and could allow new capabilities such as automated scheduling across constellations of satellites. Classical methods suffer from high false positive rates and previous deep learning models exhibit prohibitive computational requirements. We propose fast and accurate machine learning architectures which support end-to-end training with data of high spectral dimension without relying on hand-crafted products or spectral band compression preprocessing. We evaluate our models on two tasks related to hyperspectral data processing. With our proposed general architectures, we improve the F1 score of the previous methane detection state-of-the-art models by 27% on a newly created synthetic dataset and by 13% on the previously released large benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate that training models on the synthetic dataset improves performance of models finetuned on the dataset of real events by 6.9% in F1 score in contrast with training from scratch. On a newly created dataset for mineral identification, our models provide 3.5% improvement in the F1 score in contrast to the default versions of the models. With our proposed models we improve the inference speed by 85% in contrast to previous classical and deep learning approaches by removing the dependency on classically computed features. With our architecture, one capture from the EMIT sensor can be processed within 30 seconds on realistic proxy of the ION-SCV 004 satellite.

A Vietnamese Dataset for Evaluating Machine Reading Comprehension

Over 97 million people speak Vietnamese as their native language in the world. However, there are few research studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) for Vietnamese, the task of understanding a text and answering questions related to it. Due to the lack of benchmark datasets for Vietnamese, we present the Vietnamese Question Answering Dataset (UIT-ViQuAD), a new dataset for the low-resource language as Vietnamese to evaluate MRC models. This dataset comprises over 23,000 human-generated question-answer pairs based on 5,109 passages of 174 Vietnamese articles from Wikipedia. In particular, we propose a new process of dataset creation for Vietnamese MRC. Our in-depth analyses illustrate that our dataset requires abilities beyond simple reasoning like word matching and demands single-sentence and multiple-sentence inferences. Besides, we conduct experiments on state-of-the-art MRC methods for English and Chinese as the first experimental models on UIT-ViQuAD. We also estimate human performance on the dataset and compare it to the experimental results of powerful machine learning models. As a result, the substantial differences between human performance and the best model performance on the dataset indicate that improvements can be made on UIT-ViQuAD in future research. Our dataset is freely available on our website to encourage the research community to overcome challenges in Vietnamese MRC.

ATOM3D: Tasks On Molecules in Three Dimensions

Computational methods that operate on three-dimensional molecular structure have the potential to solve important questions in biology and chemistry. In particular, deep neural networks have gained significant attention, but their widespread adoption in the biomolecular domain has been limited by a lack of either systematic performance benchmarks or a unified toolkit for interacting with molecular data. To address this, we present ATOM3D, a collection of both novel and existing benchmark datasets spanning several key classes of biomolecules. We implement several classes of three-dimensional molecular learning methods for each of these tasks and show that they consistently improve performance relative to methods based on one- and two-dimensional representations. The specific choice of architecture proves to be critical for performance, with three-dimensional convolutional networks excelling at tasks involving complex geometries, graph networks performing well on systems requiring detailed positional information, and the more recently developed equivariant networks showing significant promise. Our results indicate that many molecular problems stand to gain from three-dimensional molecular learning, and that there is potential for improvement on many tasks which remain underexplored. To lower the barrier to entry and facilitate further developments in the field, we also provide a comprehensive suite of tools for dataset processing, model training, and evaluation in our open-source atom3d Python package. All datasets are available for download from https://www.atom3d.ai .

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.

Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT. However, developing robust ASR models for young children's speech remains challenging due to differences in pronunciation, tone, and pace compared to adult speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Mandarin speech dataset focused on children aged 3 to 5, addressing the scarcity of resources in this area. The dataset comprises 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. We provide a comprehensive analysis of speaker demographics, speech duration distribution and geographic coverage. Additionally, we evaluate ASR performance on models trained from scratch, such as Conformer, as well as fine-tuned pre-trained models like HuBERT and Whisper, where fine-tuning demonstrates significant performance improvements. Furthermore, we assess speaker verification (SV) on our dataset, showing that, despite the challenges posed by the unique vocal characteristics of young children, the dataset effectively supports both ASR and SV tasks. This dataset is a valuable contribution to Mandarin child speech research and holds potential for applications in educational technology and child-computer interaction. It will be open-source and freely available for all academic purposes.

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 .

AeroPath: An airway segmentation benchmark dataset with challenging pathology

To improve the prognosis of patients suffering from pulmonary diseases, such as lung cancer, early diagnosis and treatment are crucial. The analysis of CT images is invaluable for diagnosis, whereas high quality segmentation of the airway tree are required for intervention planning and live guidance during bronchoscopy. Recently, the Multi-domain Airway Tree Modeling (ATM'22) challenge released a large dataset, both enabling training of deep-learning based models and bringing substantial improvement of the state-of-the-art for the airway segmentation task. However, the ATM'22 dataset includes few patients with severe pathologies affecting the airway tree anatomy. In this study, we introduce a new public benchmark dataset (AeroPath), consisting of 27 CT images from patients with pathologies ranging from emphysema to large tumors, with corresponding trachea and bronchi annotations. Second, we present a multiscale fusion design for automatic airway segmentation. Models were trained on the ATM'22 dataset, tested on the AeroPath dataset, and further evaluated against competitive open-source methods. The same performance metrics as used in the ATM'22 challenge were used to benchmark the different considered approaches. Lastly, an open web application is developed, to easily test the proposed model on new data. The results demonstrated that our proposed architecture predicted topologically correct segmentations for all the patients included in the AeroPath dataset. The proposed method is robust and able to handle various anomalies, down to at least the fifth airway generation. In addition, the AeroPath dataset, featuring patients with challenging pathologies, will contribute to development of new state-of-the-art methods. The AeroPath dataset and the web application are made openly available.

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/

MozzaVID: Mozzarella Volumetric Image Dataset

Influenced by the complexity of volumetric imaging, there is a shortage of established datasets useful for benchmarking volumetric deep-learning models. As a consequence, new and existing models are not easily comparable, limiting the development of architectures optimized specifically for volumetric data. To counteract this trend, we introduce MozzaVID - a large, clean, and versatile volumetric classification dataset. Our dataset contains X-ray computed tomography (CT) images of mozzarella microstructure and enables the classification of 25 cheese types and 149 cheese samples. We provide data in three different resolutions, resulting in three dataset instances containing from 591 to 37,824 images. While being general-purpose, the dataset also facilitates investigating mozzarella structure properties. The structure of food directly affects its functional properties and thus its consumption experience. Understanding food structure helps tune the production and mimicking it enables sustainable alternatives to animal-derived food products. The complex and disordered nature of food structures brings a unique challenge, where a choice of appropriate imaging method, scale, and sample size is not trivial. With this dataset we aim to address these complexities, contributing to more robust structural analysis models. The dataset can be downloaded from: https://archive.compute.dtu.dk/files/public/projects/MozzaVID/.

Detecting Stereotypes and Anti-stereotypes the Correct Way Using Social Psychological Underpinnings

Stereotypes are known to be highly pernicious, making their detection critically important. However, current research predominantly focuses on detecting and evaluating stereotypical biases in LLMs, leaving the study of stereotypes in its early stages. Many studies have failed to clearly distinguish between stereotypes and stereotypical biases, which has significantly slowed progress in advancing research in this area. Stereotype and anti-stereotype detection is a problem that requires knowledge of society; hence, it is one of the most difficult areas in Responsible AI. This work investigates this task, where we propose a four-tuple definition and provide precise terminology distinguishing stereotype, anti-stereotype, stereotypical bias, and bias, offering valuable insights into their various aspects. In this paper, we propose StereoDetect, a high-quality benchmarking dataset curated for this task by optimally utilizing current datasets such as StereoSet and WinoQueer, involving a manual verification process and the transfer of semantic information. We demonstrate that language models for reasoning with fewer than 10B parameters often get confused when detecting anti-stereotypes. We also demonstrate the critical importance of well-curated datasets by comparing our model with other current models for stereotype detection. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/KaustubhShejole/StereoDetect.

M^{3}-20M: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Molecule Dataset for AI-driven Drug Design and Discovery

This paper introduces M^{3}-20M, a large-scale Multi-Modal Molecular dataset that contains over 20 million molecules. Designed to support AI-driven drug design and discovery, M^{3}-20M is 71 times more in the number of molecules than the largest existing dataset, providing an unprecedented scale that can highly benefit training or fine-tuning large (language) models with superior performance for drug design and discovery. This dataset integrates one-dimensional SMILES, two-dimensional molecular graphs, three-dimensional molecular structures, physicochemical properties, and textual descriptions collected through web crawling and generated by using GPT-3.5, offering a comprehensive view of each molecule. To demonstrate the power of M^{3}-20M in drug design and discovery, we conduct extensive experiments on two key tasks: molecule generation and molecular property prediction, using large language models including GLM4, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our experimental results show that M^{3}-20M can significantly boost model performance in both tasks. Specifically, it enables the models to generate more diverse and valid molecular structures and achieve higher property prediction accuracy than the existing single-modal datasets, which validates the value and potential of M^{3}-20M in supporting AI-driven drug design and discovery. The dataset is available at https://github.com/bz99bz/M-3.

DC-BENCH: Dataset Condensation Benchmark

Dataset Condensation is a newly emerging technique aiming at learning a tiny dataset that captures the rich information encoded in the original dataset. As the size of datasets contemporary machine learning models rely on becomes increasingly large, condensation methods become a prominent direction for accelerating network training and reducing data storage. Despite numerous methods have been proposed in this rapidly growing field, evaluating and comparing different condensation methods is non-trivial and still remains an open issue. The quality of condensed dataset are often shadowed by many critical contributing factors to the end performance, such as data augmentation and model architectures. The lack of a systematic way to evaluate and compare condensation methods not only hinders our understanding of existing techniques, but also discourages practical usage of the synthesized datasets. This work provides the first large-scale standardized benchmark on Dataset Condensation. It consists of a suite of evaluations to comprehensively reflect the generability and effectiveness of condensation methods through the lens of their generated dataset. Leveraging this benchmark, we conduct a large-scale study of current condensation methods, and report many insightful findings that open up new possibilities for future development. The benchmark library, including evaluators, baseline methods, and generated datasets, is open-sourced to facilitate future research and application.

T2Vs Meet VLMs: A Scalable Multimodal Dataset for Visual Harmfulness Recognition

To address the risks of encountering inappropriate or harmful content, researchers managed to incorporate several harmful contents datasets with machine learning methods to detect harmful concepts. However, existing harmful datasets are curated by the presence of a narrow range of harmful objects, and only cover real harmful content sources. This hinders the generalizability of methods based on such datasets, potentially leading to misjudgments. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive harmful dataset, Visual Harmful Dataset 11K (VHD11K), consisting of 10,000 images and 1,000 videos, crawled from the Internet and generated by 4 generative models, across a total of 10 harmful categories covering a full spectrum of harmful concepts with nontrivial definition. We also propose a novel annotation framework by formulating the annotation process as a multi-agent Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, having 3 different VLMs "debate" about whether the given image/video is harmful, and incorporating the in-context learning strategy in the debating process. Therefore, we can ensure that the VLMs consider the context of the given image/video and both sides of the arguments thoroughly before making decisions, further reducing the likelihood of misjudgments in edge cases. Evaluation and experimental results demonstrate that (1) the great alignment between the annotation from our novel annotation framework and those from human, ensuring the reliability of VHD11K; (2) our full-spectrum harmful dataset successfully identifies the inability of existing harmful content detection methods to detect extensive harmful contents and improves the performance of existing harmfulness recognition methods; (3) VHD11K outperforms the baseline dataset, SMID, as evidenced by the superior improvement in harmfulness recognition methods. The complete dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/nctu-eva-lab/VHD11K.

Not All Correct Answers Are Equal: Why Your Distillation Source Matters

Distillation has emerged as a practical and effective approach to enhance the reasoning capabilities of open-source language models. In this work, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on reasoning data distillation by collecting verified outputs from three state-of-the-art teacher models-AM-Thinking-v1, Qwen3-235B-A22B, and DeepSeek-R1-on a shared corpus of 1.89 million queries. We construct three parallel datasets and analyze their distributions, revealing that AM-Thinking-v1-distilled data exhibits greater token length diversity and lower perplexity. Student models trained on each dataset are evaluated on reasoning benchmarks including AIME2024, AIME2025, MATH500, and LiveCodeBench. The AM-based model consistently achieves the best performance (e.g., 84.3 on AIME2024, 72.2 on AIME2025, 98.4 on MATH500, and 65.9 on LiveCodeBench) and demonstrates adaptive output behavior-producing longer responses for harder tasks and shorter ones for simpler tasks. These findings highlight the value of high-quality, verified reasoning traces. We release the AM-Thinking-v1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B distilled datasets to support future research on open and high-performing reasoning-oriented language models. The datasets are publicly available on Hugging FaceDatasets are available on Hugging Face: \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/a-m-team/AM-Thinking-v1-Distilled{AM-Thinking-v1-Distilled}, https://huggingface.co/datasets/a-m-team/AM-Qwen3-Distilled{AM-Qwen3-Distilled}.}.

The ParlaSpeech Collection of Automatically Generated Speech and Text Datasets from Parliamentary Proceedings

Recent significant improvements in speech and language technologies come both from self-supervised approaches over raw language data as well as various types of explicit supervision. To ensure high-quality processing of spoken data, the most useful type of explicit supervision is still the alignment between the speech signal and its corresponding text transcript, which is a data type that is not available for many languages. In this paper, we present our approach to building large and open speech-and-text-aligned datasets of less-resourced languages based on transcripts of parliamentary proceedings and their recordings. Our starting point are the ParlaMint comparable corpora of transcripts of parliamentary proceedings of 26 national European parliaments. In the pilot run on expanding the ParlaMint corpora with aligned publicly available recordings, we focus on three Slavic languages, namely Croatian, Polish, and Serbian. The main challenge of our approach is the lack of any global alignment between the ParlaMint texts and the available recordings, as well as the sometimes varying data order in each of the modalities, which requires a novel approach in aligning long sequences of text and audio in a large search space. The results of this pilot run are three high-quality datasets that span more than 5,000 hours of speech and accompanying text transcripts. Although these datasets already make a huge difference in the availability of spoken and textual data for the three languages, we want to emphasize the potential of the presented approach in building similar datasets for many more languages.

Evaluating the Symbol Binding Ability of Large Language Models for Multiple-Choice Questions in Vietnamese General Education

In this paper, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) for multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings. We focus on Vietnamese, with fewer challenging MCQA datasets than in English. The two existing datasets, ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0, focus on literature. Recent research in Vietnamese natural language processing (NLP) has focused on the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination (VNHSGE) from 2019 to 2023 to evaluate ChatGPT. However, these studies have mainly focused on how ChatGPT solves the VNHSGE step by step. We aim to create a novel and high-quality dataset by providing structured guidelines for typing LaTeX formulas for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This dataset can be used to evaluate the MCSB ability of LLMs and smaller language models (LMs) because it is typed in a strict LaTeX style. We focus on predicting the character (A, B, C, or D) that is the most likely answer to a question, given the context of the question. Our evaluation of six well-known LLMs, namely BLOOMZ-7.1B-MT, LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-2-70B, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.0, on the ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0 benchmarks and our proposed dataset shows promising results on the MCSB ability of LLMs for Vietnamese. The dataset is available for research purposes only.

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.

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.

SonicSim: A customizable simulation platform for speech processing in moving sound source scenarios

The systematic evaluation of speech separation and enhancement models under moving sound source conditions typically requires extensive data comprising diverse scenarios. However, real-world datasets often contain insufficient data to meet the training and evaluation requirements of models. Although synthetic datasets offer a larger volume of data, their acoustic simulations lack realism. Consequently, neither real-world nor synthetic datasets effectively fulfill practical needs. To address these issues, we introduce SonicSim, a synthetic toolkit de-designed to generate highly customizable data for moving sound sources. SonicSim is developed based on the embodied AI simulation platform, Habitat-sim, supporting multi-level adjustments, including scene-level, microphone-level, and source-level, thereby generating more diverse synthetic data. Leveraging SonicSim, we constructed a moving sound source benchmark dataset, SonicSet, using the Librispeech, the Freesound Dataset 50k (FSD50K) and Free Music Archive (FMA), and 90 scenes from the Matterport3D to evaluate speech separation and enhancement models. Additionally, to validate the differences between synthetic data and real-world data, we randomly selected 5 hours of raw data without reverberation from the SonicSet validation set to record a real-world speech separation dataset, which was then compared with the corresponding synthetic datasets. Similarly, we utilized the real-world speech enhancement dataset RealMAN to validate the acoustic gap between other synthetic datasets and the SonicSet dataset for speech enhancement. The results indicate that the synthetic data generated by SonicSim can effectively generalize to real-world scenarios. Demo and code are publicly available at https://cslikai.cn/SonicSim/.

EMBER2024 -- A Benchmark Dataset for Holistic Evaluation of Malware Classifiers

A lack of accessible data has historically restricted malware analysis research, and practitioners have relied heavily on datasets provided by industry sources to advance. Existing public datasets are limited by narrow scope - most include files targeting a single platform, have labels supporting just one type of malware classification task, and make no effort to capture the evasive files that make malware detection difficult in practice. We present EMBER2024, a new dataset that enables holistic evaluation of malware classifiers. Created in collaboration with the authors of EMBER2017 and EMBER2018, the EMBER2024 dataset includes hashes, metadata, feature vectors, and labels for more than 3.2 million files from six file formats. Our dataset supports the training and evaluation of machine learning models on seven malware classification tasks, including malware detection, malware family classification, and malware behavior identification. EMBER2024 is the first to include a collection of malicious files that initially went undetected by a set of antivirus products, creating a "challenge" set to assess classifier performance against evasive malware. This work also introduces EMBER feature version 3, with added support for several new feature types. We are releasing the EMBER2024 dataset to promote reproducibility and empower researchers in the pursuit of new malware research topics.

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.

Crowdsourcing Dermatology Images with Google Search Ads: Creating a Real-World Skin Condition Dataset

Background: Health datasets from clinical sources do not reflect the breadth and diversity of disease in the real world, impacting research, medical education, and artificial intelligence (AI) tool development. Dermatology is a suitable area to develop and test a new and scalable method to create representative health datasets. Methods: We used Google Search advertisements to invite contributions to an open access dataset of images of dermatology conditions, demographic and symptom information. With informed contributor consent, we describe and release this dataset containing 10,408 images from 5,033 contributions from internet users in the United States over 8 months starting March 2023. The dataset includes dermatologist condition labels as well as estimated Fitzpatrick Skin Type (eFST) and Monk Skin Tone (eMST) labels for the images. Results: We received a median of 22 submissions/day (IQR 14-30). Female (66.72%) and younger (52% < age 40) contributors had a higher representation in the dataset compared to the US population, and 32.6% of contributors reported a non-White racial or ethnic identity. Over 97.5% of contributions were genuine images of skin conditions. Dermatologist confidence in assigning a differential diagnosis increased with the number of available variables, and showed a weaker correlation with image sharpness (Spearman's P values <0.001 and 0.01 respectively). Most contributions were short-duration (54% with onset < 7 days ago ) and 89% were allergic, infectious, or inflammatory conditions. eFST and eMST distributions reflected the geographical origin of the dataset. The dataset is available at github.com/google-research-datasets/scin . Conclusion: Search ads are effective at crowdsourcing images of health conditions. The SCIN dataset bridges important gaps in the availability of representative images of common skin conditions.

Hierarchical State Space Models for Continuous Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling

Reasoning from sequences of raw sensory data is a ubiquitous problem across fields ranging from medical devices to robotics. These problems often involve using long sequences of raw sensor data (e.g. magnetometers, piezoresistors) to predict sequences of desirable physical quantities (e.g. force, inertial measurements). While classical approaches are powerful for locally-linear prediction problems, they often fall short when using real-world sensors. These sensors are typically non-linear, are affected by extraneous variables (e.g. vibration), and exhibit data-dependent drift. For many problems, the prediction task is exacerbated by small labeled datasets since obtaining ground-truth labels requires expensive equipment. In this work, we present Hierarchical State-Space Models (HiSS), a conceptually simple, new technique for continuous sequential prediction. HiSS stacks structured state-space models on top of each other to create a temporal hierarchy. Across six real-world sensor datasets, from tactile-based state prediction to accelerometer-based inertial measurement, HiSS outperforms state-of-the-art sequence models such as causal Transformers, LSTMs, S4, and Mamba by at least 23% on MSE. Our experiments further indicate that HiSS demonstrates efficient scaling to smaller datasets and is compatible with existing data-filtering techniques. Code, datasets and videos can be found on https://hiss-csp.github.io.

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.

PeaTMOSS: A Dataset and Initial Analysis of Pre-Trained Models in Open-Source Software

The development and training of deep learning models have become increasingly costly and complex. Consequently, software engineers are adopting pre-trained models (PTMs) for their downstream applications. The dynamics of the PTM supply chain remain largely unexplored, signaling a clear need for structured datasets that document not only the metadata but also the subsequent applications of these models. Without such data, the MSR community cannot comprehensively understand the impact of PTM adoption and reuse. This paper presents the PeaTMOSS dataset, which comprises metadata for 281,638 PTMs and detailed snapshots for all PTMs with over 50 monthly downloads (14,296 PTMs), along with 28,575 open-source software repositories from GitHub that utilize these models. Additionally, the dataset includes 44,337 mappings from 15,129 downstream GitHub repositories to the 2,530 PTMs they use. To enhance the dataset's comprehensiveness, we developed prompts for a large language model to automatically extract model metadata, including the model's training datasets, parameters, and evaluation metrics. Our analysis of this dataset provides the first summary statistics for the PTM supply chain, showing the trend of PTM development and common shortcomings of PTM package documentation. Our example application reveals inconsistencies in software licenses across PTMs and their dependent projects. PeaTMOSS lays the foundation for future research, offering rich opportunities to investigate the PTM supply chain. We outline mining opportunities on PTMs, their downstream usage, and cross-cutting questions.

ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

The Lucie-7B LLM and the Lucie Training Dataset: Open resources for multilingual language generation

We present both the Lucie Training Dataset and the Lucie-7B foundation model. The Lucie Training Dataset is a multilingual collection of textual corpora centered around French and designed to offset anglo-centric biases found in many datasets for large language model pretraining. Its French data is pulled not only from traditional web sources, but also from French cultural heritage documents, filling an important gap in modern datasets. Beyond French, which makes up the largest share of the data, we added documents to support several other European languages, including English, Spanish, German, and Italian. Apart from its value as a resource for French language and culture, an important feature of this dataset is that it prioritizes data rights by minimizing copyrighted material. In addition, building on the philosophy of past open projects, it is redistributed in the form used for training and its processing is described on Hugging Face and GitHub. The Lucie-7B foundation model is trained on equal amounts of data in French and English -- roughly 33% each -- in an effort to better represent cultural aspects of French-speaking communities. We also describe two instruction fine-tuned models, Lucie-7B-Instruct-v1.1 and Lucie-7B-Instruct-human-data, which we release as demonstrations of Lucie-7B in use. These models achieve promising results compared to state-of-the-art models, demonstrating that an open approach prioritizing data rights can still deliver strong performance. We see these models as an initial step toward developing more performant, aligned models in the near future. Model weights for Lucie-7B and the Lucie instruct models, along with intermediate checkpoints for the former, are published on Hugging Face, while model training and data preparation code is available on GitHub. This makes Lucie-7B one of the first OSI compliant language models according to the new OSI definition.

CVEfixes: Automated Collection of Vulnerabilities and Their Fixes from Open-Source Software

Data-driven research on the automated discovery and repair of security vulnerabilities in source code requires comprehensive datasets of real-life vulnerable code and their fixes. To assist in such research, we propose a method to automatically collect and curate a comprehensive vulnerability dataset from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in the public National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We implement our approach in a fully automated dataset collection tool and share an initial release of the resulting vulnerability dataset named CVEfixes. The CVEfixes collection tool automatically fetches all available CVE records from the NVD, gathers the vulnerable code and corresponding fixes from associated open-source repositories, and organizes the collected information in a relational database. Moreover, the dataset is enriched with meta-data such as programming language, and detailed code and security metrics at five levels of abstraction. The collection can easily be repeated to keep up-to-date with newly discovered or patched vulnerabilities. The initial release of CVEfixes spans all published CVEs up to 9 June 2021, covering 5365 CVE records for 1754 open-source projects that were addressed in a total of 5495 vulnerability fixing commits. CVEfixes supports various types of data-driven software security research, such as vulnerability prediction, vulnerability classification, vulnerability severity prediction, analysis of vulnerability-related code changes, and automated vulnerability repair.

IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages

Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

The Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25) Dataset, Evaluations, and Models

Machine learning (ML) models hold the promise of transforming atomic simulations by delivering quantum chemical accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost. Realization of this potential would enable high-throughout, high-accuracy molecular screening campaigns to explore vast regions of chemical space and facilitate ab initio simulations at sizes and time scales that were previously inaccessible. However, a fundamental challenge to creating ML models that perform well across molecular chemistry is the lack of comprehensive data for training. Despite substantial efforts in data generation, no large-scale molecular dataset exists that combines broad chemical diversity with a high level of accuracy. To address this gap, Meta FAIR introduces Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25), a large-scale dataset composed of more than 100 million density functional theory (DFT) calculations at the omegaB97M-V/def2-TZVPD level of theory, representing billions of CPU core-hours of compute. OMol25 uniquely blends elemental, chemical, and structural diversity including: 83 elements, a wide-range of intra- and intermolecular interactions, explicit solvation, variable charge/spin, conformers, and reactive structures. There are ~83M unique molecular systems in OMol25 covering small molecules, biomolecules, metal complexes, and electrolytes, including structures obtained from existing datasets. OMol25 also greatly expands on the size of systems typically included in DFT datasets, with systems of up to 350 atoms. In addition to the public release of the data, we provide baseline models and a comprehensive set of model evaluations to encourage community engagement in developing the next-generation ML models for molecular chemistry.

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.

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.

Introducing Three New Benchmark Datasets for Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task with the objective to classify text documents into a set of classes from a structured class hierarchy. Many HTC approaches have been proposed which attempt to leverage the class hierarchy information in various ways to improve classification performance. Machine learning-based classification approaches require large amounts of training data and are most-commonly compared through three established benchmark datasets, which include the Web Of Science (WOS), Reuters Corpus Volume 1 Version 2 (RCV1-V2) and New York Times (NYT) datasets. However, apart from the RCV1-V2 dataset which is well-documented, these datasets are not accompanied with detailed description methodologies. In this paper, we introduce three new HTC benchmark datasets in the domain of research publications which comprise the titles and abstracts of papers from the Web of Science publication database. We first create two baseline datasets which use existing journal-and citation-based classification schemas. Due to the respective shortcomings of these two existing schemas, we propose an approach which combines their classifications to improve the reliability and robustness of the dataset. We evaluate the three created datasets with a clustering-based analysis and show that our proposed approach results in a higher quality dataset where documents that belong to the same class are semantically more similar compared to the other datasets. Finally, we provide the classification performance of four state-of-the-art HTC approaches on these three new datasets to provide baselines for future studies on machine learning-based techniques for scientific publication classification.

WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research

The advancement of audio-language (AL) multimodal learning tasks has been significant in recent years. However, researchers face challenges due to the costly and time-consuming collection process of existing audio-language datasets, which are limited in size. To address this data scarcity issue, we introduce WavCaps, the first large-scale weakly-labelled audio captioning dataset, comprising approximately 400k audio clips with paired captions. We sourced audio clips and their raw descriptions from web sources and a sound event detection dataset. However, the online-harvested raw descriptions are highly noisy and unsuitable for direct use in tasks such as automated audio captioning. To overcome this issue, we propose a three-stage processing pipeline for filtering noisy data and generating high-quality captions, where ChatGPT, a large language model, is leveraged to filter and transform raw descriptions automatically. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the characteristics of WavCaps dataset and evaluate it on multiple downstream audio-language multimodal learning tasks. The systems trained on WavCaps outperform previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by a significant margin. Our aspiration is for the WavCaps dataset we have proposed to facilitate research in audio-language multimodal learning and demonstrate the potential of utilizing ChatGPT to enhance academic research. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/XinhaoMei/WavCaps.

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.

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.

Using remotely sensed data for air pollution assessment

Air pollution constitutes a global problem of paramount importance that affects not only human health, but also the environment. The existence of spatial and temporal data regarding the concentrations of pollutants is crucial for performing air pollution studies and monitor emissions. However, although observation data presents great temporal coverage, the number of stations is very limited and they are usually built in more populated areas. The main objective of this work is to create models capable of inferring pollutant concentrations in locations where no observation data exists. A machine learning model, more specifically the random forest model, was developed for predicting concentrations in the Iberian Peninsula in 2019 for five selected pollutants: NO_2, O_3 SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5. Model features include satellite measurements, meteorological variables, land use classification, temporal variables (month, day of year), and spatial variables (latitude, longitude, altitude). The models were evaluated using various methods, including station 10-fold cross-validation, in which in each fold observations from 10\% of the stations are used as testing data and the rest as training data. The R^2, RMSE and mean bias were determined for each model. The NO_2 and O_3 models presented good values of R^2, 0.5524 and 0.7462, respectively. However, the SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5 models performed very poorly in this regard, with R^2 values of -0.0231, 0.3722, and 0.3303, respectively. All models slightly overestimated the ground concentrations, except the O_3 model. All models presented acceptable cross-validation RMSE, except the O_3 and PM10 models where the mean value was a little higher (12.5934 mu g/m^3 and 10.4737 mu g/m^3, respectively).

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.

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.