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byAK and the research community

Aug 19

Imaging foundation model for universal enhancement of non-ideal measurement CT

Non-ideal measurement computed tomography (NICT), which sacrifices optimal imaging standards for new advantages in CT imaging, is expanding the clinical application scope of CT images. However, with the reduction of imaging standards, the image quality has also been reduced, extremely limiting the clinical acceptability. Although numerous studies have demonstrated the feasibility of deep learning for the NICT enhancement in specific scenarios, their high data cost and limited generalizability have become large obstacles. The recent research on the foundation model has brought new opportunities for building a universal NICT enhancement model - bridging the image quality degradation with minimal data cost. However, owing to the challenges in the collection of large pre-training datasets and the compatibility of data variation, no success has been reported. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale integrated Transformer AMPlifier (TAMP), the first imaging foundation model for universal NICT enhancement. It has been pre-trained on a large-scale physical-driven simulation dataset with 3.6 million NICT-ICT image pairs, and is able to directly generalize to the NICT enhancement tasks with various non-ideal settings and body regions. Via the adaptation with few data, it can further achieve professional performance in real-world specific scenarios. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed TAMP has significant potential for promoting the exploration and application of NICT and serving a wider range of medical scenarios.

Data-Juicer 2.0: Cloud-Scale Adaptive Data Processing for and with Foundation Models

The burgeoning field of foundation models necessitates advanced data processing mechanisms capable of harnessing vast and valuable data with various types used by these models. Nevertheless, the current landscape presents unique challenges that traditional data processing frameworks struggle to handle effectively, particularly in handling the complexity of multimodal data. In response, we present Data-Juicer 2.0, a data processing system backed by 100+ data processing operators spanning text, image, video, and audio modalities, supporting more critical tasks including data analysis, synthesis, annotation, and foundation model post-training. With seamless compatibility and dedicated optimization for popular dataset hubs like Hugging Face and computing engines like Ray, it improves upon its predecessor in terms of usability, efficiency, and programmability. It features an easily accessible user interface layer that supports decoupled Python interactions, RESTful APIs, and conversational commands. It contains a new runtime layer optimized for adaptive execution and management across varying dataset scales, processing demands, and computational environments, while hiding unnecessary system details. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate Data-Juicer 2.0's remarkable performance and scalability, highlighting its capability to efficiently process TB-level data with 10k+ CPU cores. The system is publicly available and has been widely adopted in diverse research fields and real-world products such as Alibaba Cloud PAI. We actively maintain it and share insights from practical feedback, with the goal of facilitating research and application of next-generation foundation models.

Query Drift Compensation: Enabling Compatibility in Continual Learning of Retrieval Embedding Models

Text embedding models enable semantic search, powering several NLP applications like Retrieval Augmented Generation by efficient information retrieval (IR). However, text embedding models are commonly studied in scenarios where the training data is static, thus limiting its applications to dynamic scenarios where new training data emerges over time. IR methods generally encode a huge corpus of documents to low-dimensional embeddings and store them in a database index. During retrieval, a semantic search over the corpus is performed and the document whose embedding is most similar to the query embedding is returned. When updating an embedding model with new training data, using the already indexed corpus is suboptimal due to the non-compatibility issue, since the model which was used to obtain the embeddings of the corpus has changed. While re-indexing of old corpus documents using the updated model enables compatibility, it requires much higher computation and time. Thus, it is critical to study how the already indexed corpus can still be effectively used without the need of re-indexing. In this work, we establish a continual learning benchmark with large-scale datasets and continually train dense retrieval embedding models on query-document pairs from new datasets in each task and observe forgetting on old tasks due to significant drift of embeddings. We employ embedding distillation on both query and document embeddings to maintain stability and propose a novel query drift compensation method during retrieval to project new model query embeddings to the old embedding space. This enables compatibility with previously indexed corpus embeddings extracted using the old model and thus reduces the forgetting. We show that the proposed method significantly improves performance without any re-indexing. Code is available at https://github.com/dipamgoswami/QDC.

Learning to Match Jobs with Resumes from Sparse Interaction Data using Multi-View Co-Teaching Network

With the ever-increasing growth of online recruitment data, job-resume matching has become an important task to automatically match jobs with suitable resumes. This task is typically casted as a supervised text matching problem. Supervised learning is powerful when the labeled data is sufficient. However, on online recruitment platforms, job-resume interaction data is sparse and noisy, which affects the performance of job-resume match algorithms. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-view co-teaching network from sparse interaction data for job-resume matching. Our network consists of two major components, namely text-based matching model and relation-based matching model. The two parts capture semantic compatibility in two different views, and complement each other. In order to address the challenges from sparse and noisy data, we design two specific strategies to combine the two components. First, two components share the learned parameters or representations, so that the original representations of each component can be enhanced. More importantly, we adopt a co-teaching mechanism to reduce the influence of noise in training data. The core idea is to let the two components help each other by selecting more reliable training instances. The two strategies focus on representation enhancement and data enhancement, respectively. Compared with pure text-based matching models, the proposed approach is able to learn better data representations from limited or even sparse interaction data, which is more resistible to noise in training data. Experiment results have demonstrated that our model is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods for job-resume matching.

1.5-Pints Technical Report: Pretraining in Days, Not Months -- Your Language Model Thrives on Quality Data

This paper presents a compute-efficient approach to pre-training a Language Model-the "1.5-Pints"-in only 9 days, while outperforming state-of-the-art models as an instruction-following assistant.Based on MT-Bench (a benchmark that emulates human judgments), 1.5-Pints outperforms Apple's OpenELM and Microsoft's Phi.This is achieved by a carefully curated pre-training dataset of 57 billion tokens, using a mix of automated workflows and manual human review. The selection of the dataset prioritizes content that is considered expository and "textbook-like" to aid the model in reasoning and logical deduction, culminating in its overall ability as a strong and versatile AI model. In terms of the model architecture, we employed a modified Mistral tokenizer, alongside a Llama-2 architecture for wider compatibility. For training, we adopted the methodologies used by StableLM, TinyLlama, and Huggingface Zephyr. 1.5-Pints demonstrates that by focusing on data quality over quantity in LLM training, we can significantly reduce training time and resources required. We believe this approach will not only make pre-training more accessible but also reduce our carbon footprint. Our findings and resources from this research are open-sourced, aiming to facilitate further advancements in the field. The 1.5-Pints model is available in two versions: 2K and 16K context windows.

LogAI: A Library for Log Analytics and Intelligence

Software and System logs record runtime information about processes executing within a system. These logs have become the most critical and ubiquitous forms of observability data that help developers understand system behavior, monitor system health and resolve issues. However, the volume of logs generated can be humongous (of the order of petabytes per day) especially for complex distributed systems, such as cloud, search engine, social media, etc. This has propelled a lot of research on developing AI-based log based analytics and intelligence solutions that can process huge volume of raw logs and generate insights. In order to enable users to perform multiple types of AI-based log analysis tasks in a uniform manner, we introduce LogAI (https://github.com/salesforce/logai), a one-stop open source library for log analytics and intelligence. LogAI supports tasks such as log summarization, log clustering and log anomaly detection. It adopts the OpenTelemetry data model, to enable compatibility with different log management platforms. LogAI provides a unified model interface and provides popular time-series, statistical learning and deep learning models. Alongside this, LogAI also provides an out-of-the-box GUI for users to conduct interactive analysis. With LogAI, we can also easily benchmark popular deep learning algorithms for log anomaly detection without putting in redundant effort to process the logs. We have opensourced LogAI to cater to a wide range of applications benefiting both academic research and industrial prototyping.

Massive neutrinos and cosmic composition

Cosmological data probe massive neutrinos via their effects on the geometry of the Universe and the growth of structure, both of which are degenerate with the late-time expansion history. We clarify the nature of these degeneracies and the individual roles of both probes in neutrino mass inference. Geometry is strongly sensitive to neutrino masses: within LambdaCDM, the primary cosmic microwave background anisotropies alone impose that the matter fraction Omega_m must increase fivefold with increasing neutrino mass. Moreover, large-scale structure observables, like weak lensing of the CMB, are dimensionless and thus depend not on the matter density (as often quoted) but in fact the matter fraction. We explore the consequential impact of this distinction on the interplay between probes of structure, low-redshift distances, and CMB anisotropies. We derive constraints on the neutrino's masses independently from their suppression of structure and impact on geometry, showing that the latter is at least as important as the former. While the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument's recent baryon acoustic oscillation data place stringent bounds largely deriving from their geometric incompatibility with massive neutrinos, all recent type Ia supernova datasets drive marginal preferences for nonzero neutrino masses because they prefer substantially larger matter fractions. Recent CMB lensing data, however, neither exclude neutrinos' suppression of structure nor constrain it strongly enough to discriminate between mass hierarchies. Current data thus evince not a need for modified dynamics of neutrino perturbations or structure growth but rather an inconsistent compatibility with massive neutrinos' impact on the expansion history. We identify two of DESI's measurements that strongly influence its constraints, and we also discuss neutrino mass measurements in models that alter the sound horizon.

A Nonintrusive Distributed Reduced Order Modeling Framework for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to elastoviscoplastic computations

In this work, we propose a framework that constructs reduced order models for nonlinear structural mechanics in a nonintrusive fashion, and can handle large scale simulations. We identify three steps that are carried out separately in time, and possibly on different devices: (i) the production of high-fidelity solutions by a commercial software, (ii) the offline stage of the model reduction and (iii) the online stage where the reduced order model is exploited. The nonintrusivity assumes that only the displacement field solution is known, and relies on operations on simulation data during the offline phase by using an in-house code. The compatibility with a new commercial code only needs the implementation of a routine converting the mesh and result format into our in-house data format. The nonintrusive capabilities of the framework are demonstrated on numerical experiments using commercial versions of the finite element softwares Zset and Ansys Mechanical. The nonlinear constitutive equations are evaluated by using the same external plugins as for Zset or Ansys Mechanical. The large scale simulations are handled using domain decomposition and parallel computing with distributed memory. The features and performances of the framework are evaluated on two numerical applications involving elastoviscoplastic materials: the second one involves a model of high-pressure blade, where the framework is used to extrapolate cyclic loadings in 6.5 hours, whereas the reference high-fidelity computation would take 9.5 days.

zkDL: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Deep Learning Training

The recent advancements in deep learning have brought about significant changes in various aspects of people's lives. Meanwhile, these rapid developments have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the training process of deep neural networks. To protect the intellectual properties of AI developers, directly examining the training process by accessing the model parameters and training data is often prohibited for verifiers. In response to this challenge, we present zero-knowledge deep learning (zkDL), an efficient zero-knowledge proof for deep learning training. To address the long-standing challenge of verifiable computations of non-linearities in deep learning training, we introduce zkReLU, a specialized proof for the ReLU activation and its backpropagation. zkReLU turns the disadvantage of non-arithmetic relations into an advantage, leading to the creation of FAC4DNN, our specialized arithmetic circuit design for modelling neural networks. This design aggregates the proofs over different layers and training steps, without being constrained by their sequential order in the training process. With our new CUDA implementation that achieves full compatibility with the tensor structures and the aggregated proof design, zkDL enables the generation of complete and sound proofs in less than a second per batch update for an 8-layer neural network with 10M parameters and a batch size of 64, while provably ensuring the privacy of data and model parameters. To our best knowledge, we are not aware of any existing work on zero-knowledge proof of deep learning training that is scalable to million-size networks.

ClimSim: An open large-scale dataset for training high-resolution physics emulators in hybrid multi-scale climate simulators

Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res, https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res, and https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res_aqua-planet) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.

Unified Embedding: Battle-Tested Feature Representations for Web-Scale ML Systems

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

Few-shot Tuning of Foundation Models for Class-incremental Learning

For the first time, we explore few-shot tuning of vision foundation models for class-incremental learning. Unlike existing few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) methods, which train an encoder on a base session to ensure forward compatibility for future continual learning, foundation models are generally trained on large unlabelled data without such considerations. This renders prior methods from traditional FSCIL incompatible for FSCIL with the foundation model. To this end, we propose Consistency-guided Asynchronous Contrastive Tuning (CoACT), a new approach to continually tune foundation models for new classes in few-shot settings. CoACT comprises three components: (i) asynchronous contrastive tuning, which learns new classes by including LoRA modules in the pre-trained encoder, while enforcing consistency between two asynchronous encoders; (ii) controlled fine-tuning, which facilitates effective tuning of a subset of the foundation model; and (iii) consistency-guided incremental tuning, which enforces additional regularization during later sessions to reduce forgetting of the learned classes. We perform an extensive study on 16 diverse datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of CoACT, outperforming the best baseline method by 2.47% on average and with up to 12.52% on individual datasets. Additionally, CoACT shows reduced forgetting and robustness in low-shot experiments. As an added bonus, CoACT shows up to 13.5% improvement in standard FSCIL over the current SOTA on benchmark evaluations. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ShuvenduRoy/CoACT-FSCIL.

Exploring Transformer Backbones for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation

Previous works on Treatment Effect Estimation (TEE) are not in widespread use because they are predominantly theoretical, where strong parametric assumptions are made but untractable for practical application. Recent work uses multilayer perceptron (MLP) for modeling casual relationships, however, MLPs lag far behind recent advances in ML methodology, which limits their applicability and generalizability. To extend beyond the single domain formulation and towards more realistic learning scenarios, we explore model design spaces beyond MLPs, i.e., transformer backbones, which provide flexibility where attention layers govern interactions among treatments and covariates to exploit structural similarities of potential outcomes for confounding control. Through careful model design, Transformers as Treatment Effect Estimators (TransTEE) is proposed. We show empirically that TransTEE can: (1) serve as a general purpose treatment effect estimator that significantly outperforms competitive baselines in a variety of challenging TEE problems (e.g., discrete, continuous, structured, or dosage-associated treatments) and is applicable to both when covariates are tabular and when they consist of structural data (e.g., texts, graphs); (2) yield multiple advantages: compatibility with propensity score modeling, parameter efficiency, robustness to continuous treatment value distribution shifts, explainable in covariate adjustment, and real-world utility in auditing pre-trained language models

Valentine: Evaluating Matching Techniques for Dataset Discovery

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method's success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods.

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

Data Cards: Purposeful and Transparent Dataset Documentation for Responsible AI

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

Matching Table Metadata with Business Glossaries Using Large Language Models

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Knowledge Augmented Machine Learning with Applications in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

The availability of representative datasets is an essential prerequisite for many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, in real life applications these models often encounter scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. There are various reasons for the absence of sufficient data, ranging from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable usage of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is still a tremendous challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches. Knowledge augmented machine learning approaches offer the possibility of compensating for deficiencies, errors, or ambiguities in the data, thus increasing the generalization capability of the applied models. Even more, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-driven models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories knowledge integration, extraction and conformity. In particular, we address the application of the presented methods in the field of autonomous driving.

DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models

Many organizations rely on data from government and third-party sources, and those sources rarely follow the same data formatting. This introduces challenges in integrating data from multiple sources or aligning external sources with internal databases. Commercial database systems do not offer adequate support for integrating data from heterogeneous sources, and manual integration is both time-consuming and inefficient. State-of-the-art data integration approaches that rely on similarity functions and textual transformations often fail to handle challenging cases where multiple mappings are required, or the mappings go beyond simple textual transformations. In this paper, we study the potentials of deep neural models for transforming tables for joinability. In particular, we cast the problem as a prediction task and develop a framework that leverages large deep-learning language models to transform tabular data from a source formatting to a desired target representation. Our framework can efficiently learn the patterns for mapping a source formatting into an expected target using just a few examples, which can then be used for tasks such as table joining, filling in missing values, and error detection. Compared to state-of-the-art mapping and joining approaches, our framework delivers noticeably more accurate and scalable performance on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experimental evaluation also shows that the performance of the proposed framework using our fine-tuned model is at par or better than large language models such as GPT-3, despite the significant difference in size, and that using large language models within our framework improves their performance.

OpenDataLab: Empowering General Artificial Intelligence with Open Datasets

The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) hinges on the quality and accessibility of data, yet the current fragmentation and variability of data sources hinder efficient data utilization. The dispersion of data sources and diversity of data formats often lead to inefficiencies in data retrieval and processing, significantly impeding the progress of AI research and applications. To address these challenges, this paper introduces OpenDataLab, a platform designed to bridge the gap between diverse data sources and the need for unified data processing. OpenDataLab integrates a wide range of open-source AI datasets and enhances data acquisition efficiency through intelligent querying and high-speed downloading services. The platform employs a next-generation AI Data Set Description Language (DSDL), which standardizes the representation of multimodal and multi-format data, improving interoperability and reusability. Additionally, OpenDataLab optimizes data processing through tools that complement DSDL. By integrating data with unified data descriptions and smart data toolchains, OpenDataLab can improve data preparation efficiency by 30\%. We anticipate that OpenDataLab will significantly boost artificial general intelligence (AGI) research and facilitate advancements in related AI fields. For more detailed information, please visit the platform's official website: https://opendatalab.com.

HelpSteer2-Preference: Complementing Ratings with Preferences

Reward models are critical for aligning models to follow instructions, and are typically trained following one of two popular paradigms: Bradley-Terry style or Regression style. However, there is a lack of evidence that either approach is better than the other, when adequately matched for data. This is primarily because these approaches require data collected in different (but incompatible) formats, meaning that adequately matched data is not available in existing public datasets. To tackle this problem, we release preference annotations (designed for Bradley-Terry training) to complement existing ratings (designed for Regression style training) in the HelpSteer2 dataset. To improve data interpretability, preference annotations are accompanied with human-written justifications. Using this data, we conduct the first head-to-head comparison of Bradley-Terry and Regression models when adequately matched for data. Based on insights derived from such a comparison, we propose a novel approach to combine Bradley-Terry and Regression reward modeling. A Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model tuned with this approach scores 94.1 on RewardBench, emerging top of more than 140 reward models as of 1 Oct 2024. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of this reward model at aligning models to follow instructions in RLHF. We open-source this dataset (CC-BY-4.0 license) at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/HelpSteer2 and openly release the trained Reward Model at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward

Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

Solving Data Quality Problems with Desbordante: a Demo

Data profiling is an essential process in modern data-driven industries. One of its critical components is the discovery and validation of complex statistics, including functional dependencies, data constraints, association rules, and others. However, most existing data profiling systems that focus on complex statistics do not provide proper integration with the tools used by contemporary data scientists. This creates a significant barrier to the adoption of these tools in the industry. Moreover, existing systems were not created with industrial-grade workloads in mind. Finally, they do not aim to provide descriptive explanations, i.e. why a given pattern is not found. It is a significant issue as it is essential to understand the underlying reasons for a specific pattern's absence to make informed decisions based on the data. Because of that, these patterns are effectively rest in thin air: their application scope is rather limited, they are rarely used by the broader public. At the same time, as we are going to demonstrate in this presentation, complex statistics can be efficiently used to solve many classic data quality problems. Desbordante is an open-source data profiler that aims to close this gap. It is built with emphasis on industrial application: it is efficient, scalable, resilient to crashes, and provides explanations. Furthermore, it provides seamless Python integration by offloading various costly operations to the C++ core, not only mining. In this demonstration, we show several scenarios that allow end users to solve different data quality problems. Namely, we showcase typo detection, data deduplication, and data anomaly detection scenarios.

Matchmaker: Self-Improving Large Language Model Programs for Schema Matching

Schema matching -- the task of finding matches between attributes across disparate data sources with different tables and hierarchies -- is critical for creating interoperable machine learning (ML)-ready data. Addressing this fundamental data-centric problem has wide implications, especially in domains like healthcare, finance and e-commerce -- but also has the potential to benefit ML models more generally, by increasing the data available for ML model training. However, schema matching is a challenging ML task due to structural/hierarchical and semantic heterogeneity between different schemas. Previous ML approaches to automate schema matching have either required significant labeled data for model training, which is often unrealistic or suffer from poor zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose Matchmaker - a compositional language model program for schema matching, comprised of candidate generation, refinement and confidence scoring. Matchmaker also self-improves in a zero-shot manner without the need for labeled demonstrations via a novel optimization approach, which constructs synthetic in-context demonstrations to guide the language model's reasoning process. Empirically, we demonstrate on real-world medical schema matching benchmarks that Matchmaker outperforms previous ML-based approaches, highlighting its potential to accelerate data integration and interoperability of ML-ready data.

OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become closed-source due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released Llama3.1 family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms on-policy data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs (approx 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the Llama-3.1-8B-Base using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% rightarrow 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Foundation Models and Fair Use

Existing foundation models are trained on copyrighted material. Deploying these models can pose both legal and ethical risks when data creators fail to receive appropriate attribution or compensation. In the United States and several other countries, copyrighted content may be used to build foundation models without incurring liability due to the fair use doctrine. However, there is a caveat: If the model produces output that is similar to copyrighted data, particularly in scenarios that affect the market of that data, fair use may no longer apply to the output of the model. In this work, we emphasize that fair use is not guaranteed, and additional work may be necessary to keep model development and deployment squarely in the realm of fair use. First, we survey the potential risks of developing and deploying foundation models based on copyrighted content. We review relevant U.S. case law, drawing parallels to existing and potential applications for generating text, source code, and visual art. Experiments confirm that popular foundation models can generate content considerably similar to copyrighted material. Second, we discuss technical mitigations that can help foundation models stay in line with fair use. We argue that more research is needed to align mitigation strategies with the current state of the law. Lastly, we suggest that the law and technical mitigations should co-evolve. For example, coupled with other policy mechanisms, the law could more explicitly consider safe harbors when strong technical tools are used to mitigate infringement harms. This co-evolution may help strike a balance between intellectual property and innovation, which speaks to the original goal of fair use. But we emphasize that the strategies we describe here are not a panacea and more work is needed to develop policies that address the potential harms of foundation models.

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.

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.

Awareness in Practice: Tensions in Access to Sensitive Attribute Data for Antidiscrimination

Organizations cannot address demographic disparities that they cannot see. Recent research on machine learning and fairness has emphasized that awareness of sensitive attributes, such as race and sex, is critical to the development of interventions. However, on the ground, the existence of these data cannot be taken for granted. This paper uses the domains of employment, credit, and healthcare in the United States to surface conditions that have shaped the availability of sensitive attribute data. For each domain, we describe how and when private companies collect or infer sensitive attribute data for antidiscrimination purposes. An inconsistent story emerges: Some companies are required by law to collect sensitive attribute data, while others are prohibited from doing so. Still others, in the absence of legal mandates, have determined that collection and imputation of these data are appropriate to address disparities. This story has important implications for fairness research and its future applications. If companies that mediate access to life opportunities are unable or hesitant to collect or infer sensitive attribute data, then proposed techniques to detect and mitigate bias in machine learning models might never be implemented outside the lab. We conclude that today's legal requirements and corporate practices, while highly inconsistent across domains, offer lessons for how to approach the collection and inference of sensitive data in appropriate circumstances. We urge stakeholders, including machine learning practitioners, to actively help chart a path forward that takes both policy goals and technical needs into account.

BARS: Towards Open Benchmarking for Recommender Systems

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using different experimental settings. Such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project (namely BARS) aiming for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In comparison to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take a further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It covers both matching and ranking tasks, and also enables researchers to easily follow and contribute to the research in this field. This project will not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. We would like to call upon everyone to use the BARS benchmark for future evaluation, and contribute to the project through the portal at: https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS.

PRISM: Patient Records Interpretation for Semantic Clinical Trial Matching using Large Language Models

Clinical trial matching is the task of identifying trials for which patients may be potentially eligible. Typically, this task is labor-intensive and requires detailed verification of patient electronic health records (EHRs) against the stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria of clinical trials. This process is manual, time-intensive, and challenging to scale up, resulting in many patients missing out on potential therapeutic options. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made automating patient-trial matching possible, as shown in multiple concurrent research studies. However, the current approaches are confined to constrained, often synthetic datasets that do not adequately mirror the complexities encountered in real-world medical data. In this study, we present the first, end-to-end large-scale empirical evaluation of clinical trial matching using real-world EHRs. Our study showcases the capability of LLMs to accurately match patients with appropriate clinical trials. We perform experiments with proprietary LLMs, including GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, as well as our custom fine-tuned model called OncoLLM and show that OncoLLM, despite its significantly smaller size, not only outperforms GPT-3.5 but also matches the performance of qualified medical doctors. All experiments were carried out on real-world EHRs that include clinical notes and available clinical trials from a single cancer center in the United States.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Advancing Big Data Analytics and Management

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

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.

Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations

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

Automotive Perception Software Development: An Empirical Investigation into Data, Annotation, and Ecosystem Challenges

Software that contains machine learning algorithms is an integral part of automotive perception, for example, in driving automation systems. The development of such software, specifically the training and validation of the machine learning components, require large annotated datasets. An industry of data and annotation services has emerged to serve the development of such data-intensive automotive software components. Wide-spread difficulties to specify data and annotation needs challenge collaborations between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and their suppliers of software components, data, and annotations. This paper investigates the reasons for these difficulties for practitioners in the Swedish automotive industry to arrive at clear specifications for data and annotations. The results from an interview study show that a lack of effective metrics for data quality aspects, ambiguities in the way of working, unclear definitions of annotation quality, and deficits in the business ecosystems are causes for the difficulty in deriving the specifications. We provide a list of recommendations that can mitigate challenges when deriving specifications and we propose future research opportunities to overcome these challenges. Our work contributes towards the on-going research on accountability of machine learning as applied to complex software systems, especially for high-stake applications such as automated driving.

SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric Datastore

The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.

Building Flexible, Scalable, and Machine Learning-ready Multimodal Oncology Datasets

The advancements in data acquisition, storage, and processing techniques have resulted in the rapid growth of heterogeneous medical data. Integrating radiological scans, histopathology images, and molecular information with clinical data is essential for developing a holistic understanding of the disease and optimizing treatment. The need for integrating data from multiple sources is further pronounced in complex diseases such as cancer for enabling precision medicine and personalized treatments. This work proposes Multimodal Integration of Oncology Data System (MINDS) - a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective metadata framework for efficiently fusing disparate data from public sources such as the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) into an interconnected, patient-centric framework. MINDS offers an interface for exploring relationships across data types and building cohorts for developing large-scale multimodal machine learning models. By harmonizing multimodal data, MINDS aims to potentially empower researchers with greater analytical ability to uncover diagnostic and prognostic insights and enable evidence-based personalized care. MINDS tracks granular end-to-end data provenance, ensuring reproducibility and transparency. The cloud-native architecture of MINDS can handle exponential data growth in a secure, cost-optimized manner while ensuring substantial storage optimization, replication avoidance, and dynamic access capabilities. Auto-scaling, access controls, and other mechanisms guarantee pipelines' scalability and security. MINDS overcomes the limitations of existing biomedical data silos via an interoperable metadata-driven approach that represents a pivotal step toward the future of oncology data integration.

TableGPT2: A Large Multimodal Model with Tabular Data Integration

The emergence of models like GPTs, Claude, LLaMA, and Qwen has reshaped AI applications, presenting vast new opportunities across industries. Yet, the integration of tabular data remains notably underdeveloped, despite its foundational role in numerous real-world domains. This gap is critical for three main reasons. First, database or data warehouse data integration is essential for advanced applications; second, the vast and largely untapped resource of tabular data offers immense potential for analysis; and third, the business intelligence domain specifically demands adaptable, precise solutions that many current LLMs may struggle to provide. In response, we introduce TableGPT2, a model rigorously pre-trained and fine-tuned with over 593.8K tables and 2.36M high-quality query-table-output tuples, a scale of table-related data unprecedented in prior research. This extensive training enables TableGPT2 to excel in table-centric tasks while maintaining strong general language and coding abilities. One of TableGPT2's key innovations is its novel table encoder, specifically designed to capture schema-level and cell-level information. This encoder strengthens the model's ability to handle ambiguous queries, missing column names, and irregular tables commonly encountered in real-world applications. Similar to visual language models, this pioneering approach integrates with the decoder to form a robust large multimodal model. We believe the results are compelling: over 23 benchmarking metrics, TableGPT2 achieves an average performance improvement of 35.20% in the 7B model and 49.32% in the 72B model over prior benchmark-neutral LLMs, with robust general-purpose capabilities intact.

Text2Node: a Cross-Domain System for Mapping Arbitrary Phrases to a Taxonomy

Electronic health record (EHR) systems are used extensively throughout the healthcare domain. However, data interchangeability between EHR systems is limited due to the use of different coding standards across systems. Existing methods of mapping coding standards based on manual human experts mapping, dictionary mapping, symbolic NLP and classification are unscalable and cannot accommodate large scale EHR datasets. In this work, we present Text2Node, a cross-domain mapping system capable of mapping medical phrases to concepts in a large taxonomy (such as SNOMED CT). The system is designed to generalize from a limited set of training samples and map phrases to elements of the taxonomy that are not covered by training data. As a result, our system is scalable, robust to wording variants between coding systems and can output highly relevant concepts when no exact concept exists in the target taxonomy. Text2Node operates in three main stages: first, the lexicon is mapped to word embeddings; second, the taxonomy is vectorized using node embeddings; and finally, the mapping function is trained to connect the two embedding spaces. We compared multiple algorithms and architectures for each stage of the training, including GloVe and FastText word embeddings, CNN and Bi-LSTM mapping functions, and node2vec for node embeddings. We confirmed the robustness and generalisation properties of Text2Node by mapping ICD-9-CM Diagnosis phrases to SNOMED CT and by zero-shot training at comparable accuracy. This system is a novel methodological contribution to the task of normalizing and linking phrases to a taxonomy, advancing data interchangeability in healthcare. When applied, the system can use electronic health records to generate an embedding that incorporates taxonomical medical knowledge to improve clinical predictive models.

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

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

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

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

Should ChatGPT and Bard Share Revenue with Their Data Providers? A New Business Model for the AI Era

With various AI tools such as ChatGPT becoming increasingly popular, we are entering a true AI era. We can foresee that exceptional AI tools will soon reap considerable profits. A crucial question arise: should AI tools share revenue with their training data providers in additional to traditional stakeholders and shareholders? The answer is Yes. Large AI tools, such as large language models, always require more and better quality data to continuously improve, but current copyright laws limit their access to various types of data. Sharing revenue between AI tools and their data providers could transform the current hostile zero-sum game relationship between AI tools and a majority of copyrighted data owners into a collaborative and mutually beneficial one, which is necessary to facilitate the development of a virtuous cycle among AI tools, their users and data providers that drives forward AI technology and builds a healthy AI ecosystem. However, current revenue-sharing business models do not work for AI tools in the forthcoming AI era, since the most widely used metrics for website-based traffic and action, such as clicks, will be replaced by new metrics such as prompts and cost per prompt for generative AI tools. A completely new revenue-sharing business model, which must be almost independent of AI tools and be easily explained to data providers, needs to establish a prompt-based scoring system to measure data engagement of each data provider. This paper systematically discusses how to build such a scoring system for all data providers for AI tools based on classification and content similarity models, and outlines the requirements for AI tools or third parties to build it. Sharing revenue with data providers using such a scoring system would encourage more data owners to participate in the revenue-sharing program. This will be a utilitarian AI era where all parties benefit.

SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering (SE) can offer assistance for coding. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation of LLMs in practical coding contexts, Carlos et al. introduced the SWE-bench dataset, which comprises 2,294 real-world GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests, collected from 12 widely used Python repositories. Several impressive LLM-based toolkits recently are developed and evaluated on this dataset. However, a systematic evaluation of the quality of SWE-bench remains missing. In this paper, we addressed this gap by presenting an empirical analysis of the SWE-bench dataset. We conducted a manual screening of instances where SWEAgent + GPT-4 successfully resolved issues by comparing the model-generated patches with the actual pull requests. SWE-Agent+GPT-4 was at the top of SWE-bench leaderboard during the time of our study. Our analysis reveals some critical issues with the SWE-bench dataset: 1) 32.67% of the successful patches involve cheating as the solutions were directly provided in the issue report or the comments. We refer to as solution leakage problem. 2) 31.08% of the passed patches are suspicious patches due to weak test cases, i.e., the tests were not adequate to verify the correctness of a patch. When we filtered out these problematic issues, the resolution rate of SWE-Agent+GPT-4 dropped from 12.47% to 3.97%. We also observed that the same data quality issues also exist in the two variants of SWE-bench, i.e., SWE-bench Lite and SWE-Bench Verified. In addition, over 94% of the issues were created before LLM's knowledge cutoff dates, posing potential data leakage issues.

Disentangled Structural and Featural Representation for Task-Agnostic Graph Valuation

With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.

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.

Aligning benchmark datasets for table structure recognition

Benchmark datasets for table structure recognition (TSR) must be carefully processed to ensure they are annotated consistently. However, even if a dataset's annotations are self-consistent, there may be significant inconsistency across datasets, which can harm the performance of models trained and evaluated on them. In this work, we show that aligning these benchmarksx2014removing both errors and inconsistency between themx2014improves model performance significantly. We demonstrate this through a data-centric approach where we adopt a single model architecture, the Table Transformer (TATR), that we hold fixed throughout. Baseline exact match accuracy for TATR evaluated on the ICDAR-2013 benchmark is 65% when trained on PubTables-1M, 42% when trained on FinTabNet, and 69% combined. After reducing annotation mistakes and inter-dataset inconsistency, performance of TATR evaluated on ICDAR-2013 increases substantially to 75% when trained on PubTables-1M, 65% when trained on FinTabNet, and 81% combined. We show through ablations over the modification steps that canonicalization of the table annotations has a significantly positive effect on performance, while other choices balance necessary trade-offs that arise when deciding a benchmark dataset's final composition. Overall we believe our work has significant implications for benchmark design for TSR and potentially other tasks as well. All dataset processing and training code will be released.

OmniMatch: Effective Self-Supervised Any-Join Discovery in Tabular Data Repositories

How can we discover join relationships among columns of tabular data in a data repository? Can this be done effectively when metadata is missing? Traditional column matching works mainly rely on similarity measures based on exact value overlaps, hence missing important semantics or failing to handle noise in the data. At the same time, recent dataset discovery methods focusing on deep table representation learning techniques, do not take into consideration the rich set of column similarity signals found in prior matching and discovery methods. Finally, existing methods heavily depend on user-provided similarity thresholds, hindering their deployability in real-world settings. In this paper, we propose OmniMatch, a novel join discovery technique that detects equi-joins and fuzzy-joins betwen columns by combining column-pair similarity measures with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). OmniMatch's GNN can capture column relatedness leveraging graph transitivity, significantly improving the recall of join discovery tasks. At the same time, OmniMatch also increases the precision by augmenting its training data with negative column join examples through an automated negative example generation process. Most importantly, compared to the state-of-the-art matching and discovery methods, OmniMatch exhibits up to 14% higher effectiveness in F1 score and AUC without relying on metadata or user-provided thresholds for each similarity metric.

Performance Scaling via Optimal Transport: Enabling Data Selection from Partially Revealed Sources

Traditionally, data selection has been studied in settings where all samples from prospective sources are fully revealed to a machine learning developer. However, in practical data exchange scenarios, data providers often reveal only a limited subset of samples before an acquisition decision is made. Recently, there have been efforts to fit scaling laws that predict model performance at any size and data source composition using the limited available samples. However, these scaling functions are black-box, computationally expensive to fit, highly susceptible to overfitting, or/and difficult to optimize for data selection. This paper proposes a framework called <projektor>, which predicts model performance and supports data selection decisions based on partial samples of prospective data sources. Our approach distinguishes itself from existing work by introducing a novel *two-stage* performance inference process. In the first stage, we leverage the Optimal Transport distance to predict the model's performance for any data mixture ratio within the range of disclosed data sizes. In the second stage, we extrapolate the performance to larger undisclosed data sizes based on a novel parameter-free mapping technique inspired by neural scaling laws. We further derive an efficient gradient-based method to select data sources based on the projected model performance. Evaluation over a diverse range of applications demonstrates that <projektor> significantly improves existing performance scaling approaches in terms of both the accuracy of performance inference and the computation costs associated with constructing the performance predictor. Also, <projektor> outperforms by a wide margin in data selection effectiveness compared to a range of other off-the-shelf solutions.

EHRCon: Dataset for Checking Consistency between Unstructured Notes and Structured Tables in Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are integral for storing comprehensive patient medical records, combining structured data (e.g., medications) with detailed clinical notes (e.g., physician notes). These elements are essential for straightforward data retrieval and provide deep, contextual insights into patient care. However, they often suffer from discrepancies due to unintuitive EHR system designs and human errors, posing serious risks to patient safety. To address this, we developed EHRCon, a new dataset and task specifically designed to ensure data consistency between structured tables and unstructured notes in EHRs. EHRCon was crafted in collaboration with healthcare professionals using the MIMIC-III EHR dataset, and includes manual annotations of 3,943 entities across 105 clinical notes checked against database entries for consistency. EHRCon has two versions, one using the original MIMIC-III schema, and another using the OMOP CDM schema, in order to increase its applicability and generalizability. Furthermore, leveraging the capabilities of large language models, we introduce CheckEHR, a novel framework for verifying the consistency between clinical notes and database tables. CheckEHR utilizes an eight-stage process and shows promising results in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. The code is available at https://github.com/dustn1259/EHRCon.

Fidelity and Privacy of Synthetic Medical Data

The digitization of medical records ushered in a new era of big data to clinical science, and with it the possibility that data could be shared, to multiply insights beyond what investigators could abstract from paper records. The need to share individual-level medical data to accelerate innovation in precision medicine continues to grow, and has never been more urgent, as scientists grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, enthusiasm for the use of big data has been tempered by a fully appropriate concern for patient autonomy and privacy. That is, the ability to extract private or confidential information about an individual, in practice, renders it difficult to share data, since significant infrastructure and data governance must be established before data can be shared. Although HIPAA provided de-identification as an approved mechanism for data sharing, linkage attacks were identified as a major vulnerability. A variety of mechanisms have been established to avoid leaking private information, such as field suppression or abstraction, strictly limiting the amount of information that can be shared, or employing mathematical techniques such as differential privacy. Another approach, which we focus on here, is creating synthetic data that mimics the underlying data. For synthetic data to be a useful mechanism in support of medical innovation and a proxy for real-world evidence, one must demonstrate two properties of the synthetic dataset: (1) any analysis on the real data must be matched by analysis of the synthetic data (statistical fidelity) and (2) the synthetic data must preserve privacy, with minimal risk of re-identification (privacy guarantee). In this paper we propose a framework for quantifying the statistical fidelity and privacy preservation properties of synthetic datasets and demonstrate these metrics for synthetic data generated by Syntegra technology.

EHRSHOT: An EHR Benchmark for Few-Shot Evaluation of Foundation Models

While the general machine learning (ML) community has benefited from public datasets, tasks, and models, the progress of ML in healthcare has been hampered by a lack of such shared assets. The success of foundation models creates new challenges for healthcare ML by requiring access to shared pretrained models to validate performance benefits. We help address these challenges through three contributions. First, we publish a new dataset, EHRSHOT, which contains deidentified structured data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of 6,739 patients from Stanford Medicine. Unlike MIMIC-III/IV and other popular EHR datasets, EHRSHOT is longitudinal and not restricted to ICU/ED patients. Second, we publish the weights of CLMBR-T-base, a 141M parameter clinical foundation model pretrained on the structured EHR data of 2.57M patients. We are one of the first to fully release such a model for coded EHR data; in contrast, most prior models released for clinical data (e.g. GatorTron, ClinicalBERT) only work with unstructured text and cannot process the rich, structured data within an EHR. We provide an end-to-end pipeline for the community to validate and build upon its performance. Third, we define 15 few-shot clinical prediction tasks, enabling evaluation of foundation models on benefits such as sample efficiency and task adaptation. Our model and dataset are available via a research data use agreement from the Stanford AIMI Center. Code to reproduce our results are available at our Github repo: https://github.com/som-shahlab/ehrshot-benchmark

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

Unsupervised Matching of Data and Text

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

Source Code Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey

The increasingly popular adoption of deep learning models in many critical source code tasks motivates the development of data augmentation (DA) techniques to enhance training data and improve various capabilities (e.g., robustness and generalizability) of these models. Although a series of DA methods have been proposed and tailored for source code models, there lacks a comprehensive survey and examination to understand their effectiveness and implications. This paper fills this gap by conducting a comprehensive and integrative survey of data augmentation for source code, wherein we systematically compile and encapsulate existing literature to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. We start with an introduction of data augmentation in source code and then provide a discussion on major representative approaches. Next, we highlight the general strategies and techniques to optimize the DA quality. Subsequently, we underscore techniques useful in real-world source code scenarios and downstream tasks. Finally, we outline the prevailing challenges and potential opportunities for future research. In essence, we aim to demystify the corpus of existing literature on source code DA for deep learning, and foster further exploration in this sphere. Complementing this, we present a continually updated GitHub repository that hosts a list of update-to-date papers on DA for source code modeling, accessible at https://github.com/terryyz/DataAug4Code.

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.

Rethinking Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samples

Large language models are increasingly trained on all the data ever produced by humans. Many have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of public benchmarks due to potential contamination in pre-training or fine-tuning datasets. While most data decontamination efforts apply string matching (e.g., n-gram overlap) to remove benchmark data, we show that these methods are insufficient, and simple variations of test data (e.g., paraphrasing, translation) can easily bypass these decontamination measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if such variation of test data is not eliminated, a 13B model can easily overfit a test benchmark and achieve drastically high performance, on par with GPT-4. We validate such observations in widely used benchmarks such as MMLU, GSK8k, and HumanEval. To address this growing risk, we propose a stronger LLM-based decontamination method and apply it to widely used pre-training and fine-tuning datasets, revealing significant previously unknown test overlap. For example, in pre-training sets such as RedPajama-Data-1T and StarCoder-Data, we identified that 8-18\% of the HumanEval benchmark overlaps. Interestingly, we also find such contamination in synthetic dataset generated by GPT-3.5/4, suggesting a potential risk of unintentional contamination. We urge the community to adopt stronger decontamination approaches when using public benchmarks. Moreover, we call for the community to actively develop fresh one-time exams to evaluate models accurately. Our decontamination tool is publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/llm-decontaminator.

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.

Compliance Cards: Computational Artifacts for Automated AI Regulation Compliance

As the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain grows more complex, AI systems and models are increasingly likely to incorporate externally-sourced ingredients such as datasets and other models. In such cases, determining whether or not an AI system or model complies with the EU AI Act will require gathering compliance-related metadata about both the AI system or model at-large as well as those externally-supplied ingredients. There must then be an analysis that looks across all of this metadata to render a prediction about the compliance of the overall AI system or model. Up until now, this process has not been automated. Thus, it has not been possible to make real-time compliance determinations in scenarios where doing so would be advantageous, such as the iterative workflows of today's AI developers, search and acquisition of AI ingredients on communities like Hugging Face, federated and continuous learning, and more. To address this shortcoming, we introduce a highly automated system for AI Act compliance analysis. This system has two key elements. First is an interlocking set of computational artifacts that capture compliance-related metadata about both: (1) the AI system or model at-large; (2) any constituent ingredients such as datasets and models. Second is an automated analysis algorithm that operates across those computational artifacts to render a run-time prediction about whether or not the overall AI system or model complies with the AI Act. Working together, these elements promise to enhance and accelerate AI Act compliance assessments.

The Dataset Nutrition Label: A Framework To Drive Higher Data Quality Standards

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems built on incomplete or biased data will often exhibit problematic outcomes. Current methods of data analysis, particularly before model development, are costly and not standardized. The Dataset Nutrition Label (the Label) is a diagnostic framework that lowers the barrier to standardized data analysis by providing a distilled yet comprehensive overview of dataset "ingredients" before AI model development. Building a Label that can be applied across domains and data types requires that the framework itself be flexible and adaptable; as such, the Label is comprised of diverse qualitative and quantitative modules generated through multiple statistical and probabilistic modelling backends, but displayed in a standardized format. To demonstrate and advance this concept, we generated and published an open source prototype with seven sample modules on the ProPublica Dollars for Docs dataset. The benefits of the Label are manyfold. For data specialists, the Label will drive more robust data analysis practices, provide an efficient way to select the best dataset for their purposes, and increase the overall quality of AI models as a result of more robust training datasets and the ability to check for issues at the time of model development. For those building and publishing datasets, the Label creates an expectation of explanation, which will drive better data collection practices. We also explore the limitations of the Label, including the challenges of generalizing across diverse datasets, and the risk of using "ground truth" data as a comparison dataset. We discuss ways to move forward given the limitations identified. Lastly, we lay out future directions for the Dataset Nutrition Label project, including research and public policy agendas to further advance consideration of the concept.

Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

A Dataset for the Validation of Truth Inference Algorithms Suitable for Online Deployment

For the purpose of efficient and cost-effective large-scale data labeling, crowdsourcing is increasingly being utilized. To guarantee the quality of data labeling, multiple annotations need to be collected for each data sample, and truth inference algorithms have been developed to accurately infer the true labels. Despite previous studies having released public datasets to evaluate the efficacy of truth inference algorithms, these have typically focused on a single type of crowdsourcing task and neglected the temporal information associated with workers' annotation activities. These limitations significantly restrict the practical applicability of these algorithms, particularly in the context of long-term and online truth inference. In this paper, we introduce a substantial crowdsourcing annotation dataset collected from a real-world crowdsourcing platform. This dataset comprises approximately two thousand workers, one million tasks, and six million annotations. The data was gathered over a period of approximately six months from various types of tasks, and the timestamps of each annotation were preserved. We analyze the characteristics of the dataset from multiple perspectives and evaluate the effectiveness of several representative truth inference algorithms on this dataset. We anticipate that this dataset will stimulate future research on tracking workers' abilities over time in relation to different types of tasks, as well as enhancing online truth inference.

tasksource: Structured Dataset Preprocessing Annotations for Frictionless Extreme Multi-Task Learning and Evaluation

The HuggingFace Datasets Hub hosts thousands of datasets. This provides exciting opportunities for language model training and evaluation. However, the datasets for a given type of task are stored with different schemas, and harmonization is harder than it seems (https://xkcd.com/927/). Multi-task training or evaluation requires manual work to fit data into task templates. Various initiatives independently address this problem by releasing the harmonized datasets or harmonization codes to preprocess datasets to the same format. We identify patterns across previous preprocessings, e.g. mapping of column names, and extraction of a specific sub-field from structured data in a column, and propose a structured annotation framework that makes our annotations fully exposed and not buried in unstructured code. We release a dataset annotation framework and dataset annotations for more than 400 English tasks (https://github.com/sileod/tasksource). These annotations provide metadata, like the name of the columns that should be used as input or labels for all datasets, and can save time for future dataset preprocessings, even if they do not use our framework. We fine-tune a multi-task text encoder on all tasksource tasks, outperforming every publicly available text encoder of comparable size on an external evaluation https://hf.co/sileod/deberta-v3-base-tasksource-nli.

Multi-resolution Networks For Flexible Irregular Time Series Modeling (Multi-FIT)

Missing values, irregularly collected samples, and multi-resolution signals commonly occur in multivariate time series data, making predictive tasks difficult. These challenges are especially prevalent in the healthcare domain, where patients' vital signs and electronic records are collected at different frequencies and have occasionally missing information due to the imperfections in equipment or patient circumstances. Researchers have handled each of these issues differently, often handling missing data through mean value imputation and then using sequence models over the multivariate signals while ignoring the different resolution of signals. We propose a unified model named Multi-resolution Flexible Irregular Time series Network (Multi-FIT). The building block for Multi-FIT is the FIT network. The FIT network creates an informative dense representation at each time step using signal information such as last observed value, time difference since the last observed time stamp and overall mean for the signal. Vertical FIT (FIT-V) is a variant of FIT which also models the relationship between different temporal signals while creating the informative dense representations for the signal. The multi-FIT model uses multiple FIT networks for sets of signals with different resolutions, further facilitating the construction of flexible representations. Our model has three main contributions: a.) it does not impute values but rather creates informative representations to provide flexibility to the model for creating task-specific representations b.) it models the relationship between different signals in the form of support signals c.) it models different resolutions in parallel before merging them for the final prediction task. The FIT, FIT-V and Multi-FIT networks improve upon the state-of-the-art models for three predictive tasks, including the forecasting of patient survival.

Challenges and Considerations in Annotating Legal Data: A Comprehensive Overview

The process of annotating data within the legal sector is filled with distinct challenges that differ from other fields, primarily due to the inherent complexities of legal language and documentation. The initial task usually involves selecting an appropriate raw dataset that captures the intricate aspects of legal texts. Following this, extracting text becomes a complicated task, as legal documents often have complex structures, footnotes, references, and unique terminology. The importance of data cleaning is magnified in this context, ensuring that redundant information is eliminated while maintaining crucial legal details and context. Creating comprehensive yet straightforward annotation guidelines is imperative, as these guidelines serve as the road map for maintaining uniformity and addressing the subtle nuances of legal terminology. Another critical aspect is the involvement of legal professionals in the annotation process. Their expertise is valuable in ensuring that the data not only remains contextually accurate but also adheres to prevailing legal standards and interpretations. This paper provides an expanded view of these challenges and aims to offer a foundational understanding and guidance for researchers and professionals engaged in legal data annotation projects. In addition, we provide links to our created and fine-tuned datasets and language models. These resources are outcomes of our discussed projects and solutions to challenges faced while working on them.

Benchmarking pre-trained text embedding models in aligning built asset information

Accurate mapping of the built asset information to established data classification systems and taxonomies is crucial for effective asset management, whether for compliance at project handover or ad-hoc data integration scenarios. Due to the complex nature of built asset data, which predominantly comprises technical text elements, this process remains largely manual and reliant on domain expert input. Recent breakthroughs in contextual text representation learning (text embedding), particularly through pre-trained large language models, offer promising approaches that can facilitate the automation of cross-mapping of the built asset data. However, no comprehensive evaluation has yet been conducted to assess these models' ability to effectively represent the complex semantics specific to built asset technical terminology. This study presents a comparative benchmark of state-of-the-art text embedding models to evaluate their effectiveness in aligning built asset information with domain-specific technical concepts. Our proposed datasets are derived from two renowned built asset data classification dictionaries. The results of our benchmarking across six proposed datasets, covering three tasks of clustering, retrieval, and reranking, highlight the need for future research on domain adaptation techniques. The benchmarking resources are published as an open-source library, which will be maintained and extended to support future evaluations in this field.

Healthsheet: Development of a Transparency Artifact for Health Datasets

Machine learning (ML) approaches have demonstrated promising results in a wide range of healthcare applications. Data plays a crucial role in developing ML-based healthcare systems that directly affect people's lives. Many of the ethical issues surrounding the use of ML in healthcare stem from structural inequalities underlying the way we collect, use, and handle data. Developing guidelines to improve documentation practices regarding the creation, use, and maintenance of ML healthcare datasets is therefore of critical importance. In this work, we introduce Healthsheet, a contextualized adaptation of the original datasheet questionnaire ~gebru2018datasheets for health-specific applications. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, we adapt the datasheets for healthcare data documentation. As part of the Healthsheet development process and to understand the obstacles researchers face in creating datasheets, we worked with three publicly-available healthcare datasets as our case studies, each with different types of structured data: Electronic health Records (EHR), clinical trial study data, and smartphone-based performance outcome measures. Our findings from the interviewee study and case studies show 1) that datasheets should be contextualized for healthcare, 2) that despite incentives to adopt accountability practices such as datasheets, there is a lack of consistency in the broader use of these practices 3) how the ML for health community views datasheets and particularly Healthsheets as diagnostic tool to surface the limitations and strength of datasets and 4) the relative importance of different fields in the datasheet to healthcare concerns.

Unleashing Reasoning Capability of LLMs via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch

The availability of high-quality data is one of the most important factors in improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing works have demonstrated the effectiveness of creating more instruction data from seed questions or knowledge bases. Recent research indicates that continually scaling up data synthesis from strong models (e.g., GPT-4) can further elicit reasoning performance. Though promising, the open-sourced community still lacks high-quality data at scale and scalable data synthesis methods with affordable costs. To address this, we introduce ScaleQuest, a scalable and novel data synthesis method that utilizes "small-size" (e.g., 7B) open-source models to generate questions from scratch without the need for seed data with complex augmentation constraints. With the efficient ScaleQuest, we automatically constructed a mathematical reasoning dataset consisting of 1 million problem-solution pairs, which are more effective than existing open-sourced datasets. It can universally increase the performance of mainstream open-source models (i.e., Mistral, Llama3, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math) by achieving 29.2% to 46.4% gains on MATH. Notably, simply fine-tuning the Qwen2-Math-7B-Base model with our dataset can even surpass Qwen2-Math-7B-Instruct, a strong and well-aligned model on closed-source data, and proprietary models such as GPT-4-Turbo and Claude-3.5 Sonnet.

Automatic Data Augmentation via Invariance-Constrained Learning

Underlying data structures, such as symmetries or invariances to transformations, are often exploited to improve the solution of learning tasks. However, embedding these properties in models or learning algorithms can be challenging and computationally intensive. Data augmentation, on the other hand, induces these symmetries during training by applying multiple transformations to the input data. Despite its ubiquity, its effectiveness depends on the choices of which transformations to apply, when to do so, and how often. In fact, there is both empirical and theoretical evidence that the indiscriminate use of data augmentation can introduce biases that outweigh its benefits. This work tackles these issues by automatically adapting the data augmentation while solving the learning task. To do so, it formulates data augmentation as an invariance-constrained learning problem and leverages Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling to solve it. The result is a practical algorithm that not only does away with a priori searches for augmentation distributions, but also dynamically controls if and when data augmentation is applied. Our experiments illustrate the performance of this method, which achieves state-of-the-art results in automatic data augmentation benchmarks for CIFAR datasets. Furthermore, this approach can be used to gather insights on the actual symmetries underlying a learning task.

Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

TabReD: A Benchmark of Tabular Machine Learning in-the-Wild

Benchmarks that closely reflect downstream application scenarios are essential for the streamlined adoption of new research in tabular machine learning (ML). In this work, we examine existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of industry-grade tabular data that are underrepresented in the datasets available to the academic community. First, tabular data often changes over time in real-world deployment scenarios. This impacts model performance and requires time-based train and test splits for correct model evaluation. Yet, existing academic tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. For each specific dataset, this can have a different impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features, which in turn can affect model selection. To fill the aforementioned gaps in academic benchmarks, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets covering a wide range of domains from finance to food delivery services. We assess a large number of tabular ML models in the feature-rich, temporally-evolving data setting facilitated by TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits more common in academic benchmarks. Furthermore, on the TabReD datasets, MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results, while more sophisticated DL models are yet to prove their effectiveness.

ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency of Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mix-up Augmentation

Previous research on radiology report generation has made significant progress in terms of increasing the clinical accuracy of generated reports. In this paper, we emphasize another crucial quality that it should possess, i.e., inter-report consistency, which refers to the capability of generating consistent reports for semantically equivalent radiographs. This quality is even of greater significance than the overall report accuracy in terms of ensuring the system's credibility, as a system prone to providing conflicting results would severely erode users' trust. Regrettably, existing approaches struggle to maintain inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants. To address this issue, we propose ICON, which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation. Aiming at enhancing the system's ability to capture the similarities in semantically equivalent lesions, our approach involves first extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics. Then, we introduce a lesion-aware mix-up augmentation technique to ensure that the representations of the semantically equivalent lesions align with the same attributes, by linearly interpolating them during the training phase. Extensive experiments on three publicly available chest X-ray datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach, both in terms of improving the consistency and accuracy of the generated reports.

UltraVideo: High-Quality UHD Video Dataset with Comprehensive Captions

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