Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets

By Mubashara Akhtar, Omar Benjelloun, Costanza Conforti, J. Giner-Miguelez, Nitisha Jain, Michael Kuchnik, Quentin Lhoest, Pierre Marcenac, M. Maskey, Peter Mattson and 10 more. 2024

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Data is a critical resource for Machine Learning (ML), yet working with data remains a key friction point. This paper introduces Croissant, a metadata format for datasets that simplifies how data is used by ML tools and frameworks. Croissant makes datasets more discoverable, portable and interoperable, thereby addressing significant challenges in ML data management and responsible AI. Croissant is already supported by several popular dataset repositories, spanning hundreds of thousands of datasets, ready to be loaded into the most popular ML frameworks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems and Management, Evaluation & Benchmarks, ML Systems & Hardware