NeurIPS2024
Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets
Mubashara Akhtar, Omar Benjelloun, Costanza Conforti, Luca Foschini, Joan Giner-Miguelez, Pieter Gijsbers, Sujata S. Goswami, Nitisha Jain, Michalis Karamousadakis, Michael Kuchnik, Satyapriya Krishna, Sylvain Lesage, Quentin Lhoest, Pierre Marcenac, Manil Maskey, Peter Mattson, Luis Oala, Hamidah Oderinwale, Pierre Ruyssen, Tim Santos, Rajat Shinde, Elena Simperl, Arjun Suresh, Goeffry Thomas, Slava Tykhonov, Joaquin Vanschoren, Susheel Varma, Jos van der Velde, Steffen Vogler, Carole-Jean Wu, Luyao Zhang
Abstract
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.