SELECT: A Large-Scale Benchmark of Data Curation Strategies for Image
  Classification
Authors: name: Benjamin Feuer; name: Jiawei Xu; name: Niv Cohen; name: Patrick Yubeaton; name: Govind Mittal; name: Chinmay Hegde
Published: 2024-10-07 14:14:38

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