# Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 140 of its 231 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 140)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10133/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Bias in Bios: A Case Study of Semantic Representation Bias in a High-Stakes Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09451/) (2019)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01963/) (2021)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Neither Valid nor Reliable? Investigating the Use of LLMs as Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18076/) (2025)
- [Alignment of Diffusion Models: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07253/) (2024)
- [Surveying the Effects of Quality, Diversity, and Complexity in Synthetic Data From Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02980/) (2024)
- [Unleashing the Power of Data Tsunami: A Comprehensive Survey on Data Assessment and Selection for Instruction Tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02085/) (2024)
- [Image Generation Diversity Issues and How to Tame Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16171/) (2024)
- [Comparison requires valid measurement: Rethinking attack success rate comparisons in AI red teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18076/) (2026)
- [Whose Personae? Synthetic Persona Experiments in LLM Research and Pathways to Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00461/) (2025)
- [Diversity-driven Data Selection for Language Model Tuning through Sparse Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14050/) (2025)
- [Measuring Diversity: Axioms and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14556/) (2024)
- [Limited Linguistic Diversity in Embodied AI Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03136/) (2026)
- [Position: Beyond Assistance -- Reimagining LLMs as Ethical and Adaptive Co-Creators in Mental Health Care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16456/) (2025)
- [Ontologies in Design: How Imagining a Tree Reveals Possibilites and Assumptions in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03029/) (2025)
- [From Macro to Micro: Probing Dataset Diversity in Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24768/) (2025)
- [Understanding and Meeting Practitioner Needs When Measuring Representational Harms Caused by LLM-Based Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04482/) (2025)
- [Data-Centric Lessons To Improve Speech-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20860/) (2025)
- [We Need to Measure Data Diversity in NLP -- Better and Broader](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20264/) (2025)
- [We Need Improved Data Curation and Attribution in AI for Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02486/) (2025)
- [DiRe: Diversity-promoting Regularization for Dataset Condensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13083/) (2025)
- [Dataset Diversity Metrics and Impact on Classification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15276/) (2026)
- [Knowledge Distillation Must Account for What It Loses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25110/) (2026)
- [emb-diversity: A Tool for Embedding-Based Measurement of Data Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19848/) (2026)
- [Saliency-Based diversity and fairness Metric and FaceKeepOriginalAugment: A Novel Approach for Enhancing Fairness and Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00831/) (2024)
- [TEDI: Trustworthy and Ethical Dataset Indicators to Analyze and Compare Dataset Documentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17841/) (2025)
- [Intuitions of Machine Learning Researchers about Transfer Learning for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00902/) (2025)
- [Selecting Diverse SFT Traces Improves Post-RL Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33780/) (2026)
- [Frozen Scenes, Shifting Winners: Configuration Fragility in Text-to-3D Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00447/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning (ML) datasets, often perceived as neutral, inherently encapsulate abstract and disputed social constructs. Dataset curators frequently employ value-laden terms such as diversity, bias, and quality to characterize datasets. Despite their prevalence, these terms lack clear definitions and validation. Our research explores the implications of this issue by analyzing "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets. Drawing from social sciences, we apply principles from measurement theory to identify considerations and offer recommendations for conceptualizing, operationalizing, and evaluating diversity in datasets. Our findings have broader implications for ML research, advocating for a more nuanced and precise approach to handling value-laden properties in dataset construction.