# A Position Paper on the Automatic Generation of Machine Learning Leaderboards

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17465 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17465/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Transformer Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07755/) (2019)
- [SciREX: A Challenge Dataset for Document-Level Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00512/) (2020)
- [SemEval 2017 Task 10: ScienceIE - Extracting Keyphrases and Relations from Scientific Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02853/) (2017)
- [Identification of Tasks, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Numeric Scores for Scientific Leaderboards Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09317/) (2019)
- [AxCell: Automatic Extraction of Results from Machine Learning Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14356/) (2020)
- [TDMSci: A Specialized Corpus for Scientific Literature Entity Tagging of Tasks Datasets and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10273/) (2021)
- [End-to-End NLP Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01167/) (2021)
- [Automated Mining of Leaderboards for Empirical AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13089/) (2021)
- [A Diachronic Analysis of Paradigm Shifts in NLP Research: When, How, and Why?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12920/) (2023)
- [The Nature of NLP: Analyzing Contributions in NLP Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19505/) (2024)
- [ORKG-Leaderboards: A Systematic Workflow for Mining Leaderboards as a Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11068/) (2023)
- [DMDD: A Large-Scale Dataset for Dataset Mentions Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11779/) (2023)
- [Efficient Performance Tracking: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Construction of Scientific Leaderboards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12656/) (2024)
- [Automated Early Leaderboard Generation From Comparative Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04538/) (2018)
- [MatViX: Multimodal Information Extraction from Visually Rich Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20494/) (2024)
- [Fine-tune the Entire RAG Architecture (including DPR retriever) for Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11517/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TaxoAlign: Scholarly Taxonomy Generation Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17263/) (2025)
- [MetaLead: A Comprehensive Human-Curated Leaderboard Dataset for Transparent Reporting of Machine Learning Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22420/) (2026)
- [Using a Human-AI Teaming Approach to Create and Curate Scientific Datasets with the SCILIRE System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12638/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An important task in machine learning (ML) research is comparing prior work, which is often performed via ML leaderboards: a tabular overview of experiments with comparable conditions (e.g., same task, dataset, and metric). However, the growing volume of literature creates challenges in creating and maintaining these leaderboards. To ease this burden, researchers have developed methods to extract leaderboard entries from research papers for automated leaderboard curation. Yet, prior work varies in problem framing, complicating comparisons and limiting real-world applicability. In this position paper, we present the first overview of Automatic Leaderboard Generation (ALG) research, identifying fundamental differences in assumptions, scope, and output formats. We propose an ALG unified conceptual framework to standardise how the ALG task is defined. We offer ALG benchmarking guidelines, including recommendations for datasets and metrics that promote fair, reproducible evaluation. Lastly, we outline challenges and new directions for ALG, such as, advocating for broader coverage by including all reported results and richer metadata.