Activeloop Hub VS ffhq-dataset

Hey u/platoTheSloth, as u/gopietz mentioned (thanks a lot for the shout-out!!!), you can share them with the general public through uploading to Activeloop Platform (for researchers, we offer special terms, but even as a general public member you get up to 300GBs of free storage!). Thanks to our open source dataset format for AI, Hub, anyone can load the dataset in under 3seconds with one line of code, and stream it while training in PyTorch/TensorFlow.

u/Remote_Cancel_7977 we just launched 100+ computer vision datasets via Activeloop Hub yesterday on r/ML (#1 post for the day!). Note: we do not intend to compete with HuggingFace (we're building the database for AI). Accessing computer vision datasets via Hub is much faster than via HuggingFace though, according to some third-party benchmarks. :)

u/gopietz good question. htype="class_label" will work, but querying doesn't support multi-dimensional labels yet. Would you mind opening an issue requesting that feature?

Hi HN,

In machine learning, we are faced with tensor-based computations (that's the language that ML models think in). I've recently discovered a project that helps you make it much easier to set up and conduct machine learning projects, and enables you to create and store datasets in deep learning-native format.

Hub by Activeloop (https://github.com/activeloopai/Hub) is an open-source Python package that arranges data in Numpy-like arrays. It integrates smoothly with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch for faster GPU processing and training. In addition, one can update the data stored in the cloud, create machine learning pipelines using Hub API and interact with datasets (e.g. visualize) in Activeloop platform (https://app.activeloop.ai). The real benefit for me is that, I can stream my datasets without the need to store them on my machine (my datasets can be up to 10GB+ big, but it works just as well with 100GB+ datasets like ImageNet (https://docs.activeloop.ai/datasets/imagenet-dataset), for instance).

Hub allows us to store images, audio, video data in a way that can be accessed at lightning speed. The data can be stored on GCS/S3 buckets, local storage, or on Activeloop cloud. The data can directly be used in the training TensorFlow/ PyTorch models so that you don't need to set up data pipelines. The package also comes with data version control, dataset search queries, and distributed workloads.

For me, personally the simplicity of the API stands out, for instance:

Loading datasets in seconds

  import hub ds = hub.load("hub://activeloop/cifar10-train")

Hub by Activeloop (https://github.com/activeloopai/Hub) is an open-source Python package that arranges data in Numpy-like arrays. It integrates smoothly with deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow and PyTorch for faster GPU processing and training. In addition, one can update the data stored in the cloud, create machine learning pipelines using Hub API and interact with datasets (e.g. visualize) in Activeloop platform (https://app.activeloop.ai/3)

Consider this

Please take a look at our open-source dataset format https://github.com/activeloopai/hub and a tutorial on htypes https://docs.activeloop.ai/how-hub-works/visualization-and-htype

I'm Davit from Activeloop (activeloop.ai).

Hub.

What solution have you used that you like as a data scientist when working with large datasets? Any standard python API to access the data? Other solution? If anyone has used https://github.com/activeloopai/Hub or other similar API I'd be interested to hear your experience working with it!

Datasets like FFHQ consist of face images crawled from the Internet. While those images are published under CC licenses, the authors usually have not obtained consent from each person depicted in those images. I guess that's why they are taking takedown requests: People can send requests to remove their faces from the dataset.

The real ones were taken from this dataset.

NVIDIA's FFHQ says "Only images under permissive licenses were collected." https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset

The FFHQ dataset https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset is a high quality, high resolution, and extremely well curated dataset that is used in many recent SOTA GAN papers and also has applications in many other areas.

I trained on FFHQ and Danbooru2019 Portraits with resolution 512x512.

> Which makes it an inexcusable mistake to make in 2021 - how are you not testing for this?

They probably are, but not good enough. These things can be surprisingly hard to detect. Post hoc it is easy to see the bias, but it isn't so easy before you deploy the models.

If we take racial connotations out of it then we could say that the algorithm is doing quite well because it got the larger hierarchical class correct, primate. The algorithm doesn't know the racial connotations, it just knows the data and what metric you were seeking. BUT considering the racial and historical context this is NOT an acceptable answer (not even close).

I've made a few comments in the past about bias and how many machine learning people are deploying models without understanding them. This is what happens when you don't try to understand statistics and particularly long tail distributions. gumboshoes mentioned that Google just removed the primate type labels. That's a solution, but honestly not a great one (technically speaking). But this solution is far easier than technically fixing the problem (I'd wager that putting a strong loss penalty for misclassifiying a black person as an ape is not enough). If you follow the links from jcims then you might notice that a lot of those faces are white. Would it be all that surprising if Google trained from the FFHQ (Flickr) Dataset?[0] A dataset known to have a strong bias towards white faces. We actually saw that when Pulse[1] turned Obama white (do note that if you didn't know the left picture was a black person and who they were that this is a decent (key word) representation). So it is pretty likely that _some_ problems could simply be fixed by better datasets (This part of the LeCunn controversy last year).

Though datasets aren't the only problems here. ML can algorithmically highlight bias in datasets. Often research papers are metric hacking, or going for the highest accuracy that they can get[2]. This leaderboardism undermines some of the usage and often there's a disconnect between researchers and those in production. With large and complex datasets we might be targeting leaderboard scores until we have a sufficient accuracy on that dataset before we start focusing on bias on that dataset (or more often we, sadly, just move to a more complex dataset and start the whole process over again). There's not many people working on the biased aspects of ML systems (both in data bias and algorithmic bias), but as more people are putting these tools into production we're running into walls. Many of these people are not thinking about how these models are trained or the bias that they contain. They go to the leaderboard and pick the best pre-trained model and hit go, maybe tuning on their dataset. Tuning doesn't eliminate the bias in the pre-training (it can actually amplify it!). ~~Money~~Scale is NOT all you need, as GAMF often tries to sell. (or some try to sell augmentation as all you need)

These problems won't be solved without significant research into both data and algorithmic bias. They won't be solved until those in production also understand these principles and robust testing methods are created to find these biases. Until people understand that a good ImageNet (or even JFT-300M) score doesn't mean your model will generalize well to real world data (though there is a correlation).

So with that in mind, I'll make a prediction that rather than seeing fewer cases of these mistakes rather we're going to see more (I'd actually argue that there's a lot of this currently happening that you just don't see). The AI hype isn't dying down and more people are entering that don't want to learn the math. "Throw a neural net at it" is not and never will be the answer. Anyone saying that is selling snake oil.

I don't want people to think I'm anti-ML. In fact I'm a ML researcher. But there's a hard reality we need to face in our field. We've made a lot of progress in the last decade that is very exciting, but we've got a long way to go as well. We can't just have everyone focusing on leaderboard scores and expect to solve our problems.

[0] https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset

[1] https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801

[2] https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1434874728682901507