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Panel
The Role of Benchmarks in the Scientific Progress of Machine Learning
Lora Aroyo · Samuel Bowman · Isabelle Guyon · Joaquin Vanschoren

Wed Dec 08 07:00 AM -- 08:00 AM (PST) @

Benchmark datasets have played a crucial role in driving empirical progress in machine learning, leading to an interesting dynamic between those on a quest for state-of-the-art performance and those creating new challenging benchmarks. In this panel, we reflect on how benchmarks can lead to scientific progress, both in terms of new algorithmic innovations and improved scientific understanding. First, what qualities of a machine learning system should a good benchmark dataset seek to measure? How well can benchmarks assess performance in dynamic and novel environments, or in tasks with an open-ended set of acceptable answers? Benchmarks can also raise significant ethical concerns including poor data collection practices, under- and misrepresentation of subjects, as well as misspecification of objectives. Second, even given high-quality, carefully constructed benchmarks, which research questions can we hope to answer from leaderboard-climbing, and which ones are deprioritized or impossible to answer due to the limitations of the benchmark paradigm? In general, we hope to deepen the community’s awareness of the important role of benchmarks for advancing the science of machine learning.

Author Information

Lora Aroyo (Google Research)
Samuel Bowman (New York University)
Isabelle Guyon (U. Paris-Saclay & ChaLearn)

Isabelle Guyon recently joined Google Brain as a research scientist. She is also professor of artificial intelligence at Université Paris-Saclay (Orsay). Her areas of expertise include computer vision, bioinformatics, and power systems. She is best known for being a co-inventor of Support Vector Machines. Her recent interests are in automated machine learning, meta-learning, and data-centric AI. She has been a strong promoter of challenges and benchmarks, and is president of ChaLearn, a non-profit dedicated to organizing machine learning challenges. She is community lead of Codalab competitions, a challenge platform used both in academia and industry. She co-organized the “Challenges in Machine Learning Workshop” @ NeurIPS between 2014 and 2019, launched the "NeurIPS challenge track" in 2017 while she was general chair, and pushed the creation of the "NeurIPS datasets and benchmark track" in 2021, as a NeurIPS board member.

Joaquin Vanschoren (Eindhoven University of Technology)

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