# Data Leakage in Visual Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [TextCaps: a Dataset for Image Captioning with Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12462/) (2020)
- [Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16789/) (2023)
- [NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18018/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Looking Beyond the Obvious: A Survey on Abstract Concept Recognition for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20765/) (2025)
- [PubTables-v2: A new large-scale dataset for full-page and multi-page table extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10888/) (2025)
- [Art Beyond Semantics: Sheaf-Informed Contrastive Learning for Multi-Relational Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16321/) (2026)
- [Deep Learning-Based Meat Freshness Detection with Segmentation and OOD-Aware Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00368/) (2026)
- [FecalFed: Privacy-Preserving Poultry Disease Detection via Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00559/) (2026)
- [Beneath the Scores: Rethinking Hallucination Evaluation for Video Understanding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28991/) (2026)
- [Cost-Aware Best-LLM Identification using Dueling Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30360/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We analyze data leakage in visual datasets. Data leakage refers to images in evaluation benchmarks that have been seen during training, compromising fair model evaluation. Given that large-scale datasets are often sourced from the internet, where many computer vision benchmarks are publicly available, our efforts are focused into identifying and studying this phenomenon. We characterize visual leakage into different types according to its modality, coverage, and degree. By applying image retrieval techniques, we unequivocally show that all the analyzed datasets present some form of leakage, and that all types of leakage, from severe instances to more subtle cases, compromise the reliability of model evaluation in downstream tasks.