Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2611.03727

Auditing a Model-Hub Benchmark: Data Quality, Training Budgets, and Side Information in HuggingBench

Abstract

Benchmarks built from model hubs combine interaction data, knowledge graphs (KGs) and resource documentation, but valid files do not ensure that these artifacts describe the same objects. Treating the release as a data product, we audit HuggingBench (SIGIR 2025), a benchmark for recommending Hugging Face resources, through data validation, a replication of its eleven recommendation methods and controlled experiments with three training seeds. In three of its four external KGs, the files pass key and range checks but violate the item-entity identity constraint on which KG recommenders rely. Correcting this join improves every KG-based method in every seed, by up to 73% in mean Recall@10, and consistently reverses ten of 27 comparisons between KG configurations. The protocol matters as well: the 100-epoch budget ends before early stopping in seven to eight of 29 validation-selected settings, and 21 of 23 such setting-seed pairs improve with a longer budget. The released item text, which no reported method uses, is the strongest signal: closed-form linear models with text and the item graph exceed the best reported Recall@10 by 18% while fitting in minutes on a CPU. Checks of other recommendation releases show that individually valid releases of one dataset can use incompatible identifiers. We release corrected files, mappings, validators and logs, and derive practices for preserving identity and provenance across the artifacts of benchmarks and model lakes.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Michal Podstawski. 2026-11-01. Auditing a Model-Hub Benchmark: Data Quality, Training Budgets, and Side Information in HuggingBench. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03727

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Subspace Node Pruning

Node pruning is the art of removing computational units such as neurons, filters, attention heads, or even entire layers to significantly reduce inference time while retaining network performance. In this work, we show that a broad family of importance measures, from activation-based to Fisher-based, share a common quadratic form. Through a lower-triangular change of basis, this form yields a pruning subspace in which entire nodes can be removed while the impact of the lost units is simultaneously recovered via linear least squares. Furthermore, the importance measures within our subspace are decoupled and additive through an orthogonalization of the layer activations, allowing multi-node pruning within layers without interference between importance scores. Our method, Subspace Node Pruning (SNP), outperforms the compared baselines on VGG-16 and ResNet-50 on ImageNet. On OPT-125M and LLaMA-2 7B, SNP matches the state-of-the-art LLM Surgeon at a 40-shot schedule and outperforms it whenever fewer shots are used, all without any retraining after pruning.

cs.LG↗

On the growth of the parameters of approximating ReLU neural networks

This work focuses on the analysis of fully connected feed forward ReLU neural networks as they approximate a given, smooth function. In contrast to conventionally studied universal approximation properties under increasing architectures, e.g., in terms of width or depth of the networks, we are concerned with the asymptotic growth of the parameters of approximating networks. Such results are of interest, e.g., for error analysis or consistency results for neural network training. The main result of our work is that, for a ReLU architecture with state of the art approximation error, the realizing parameters grow at most polynomially. The obtained rate with respect to a normalized network size is compared to existing results and is shown to be superior in most cases, in particular for high dimensional input.

cs.LG↗

Correlations Are Ruining Your Gradient Descent

Natural gradient descent, and the preconditioned optimizers which have followed from it, correct gradient descent by estimating curvature and applying its inverse to the gradient. For any single layer of a deep neural network, this correction can be shown to approximately separate into two factors: one which accounts for correlations in the gradient signal, and one which accounts for correlations in the data arriving at that layer. Herein we show that this second factor can be expressed as a change of basis rather than of curvature and, considered thus, it can be removed from the optimizer entirely and placed within the network itself. Specifically, we show that, once forward weights are corrected, right-sided natural gradient descent can be implemented in a form which has three exactly equivalent forms: a gradient preconditioner, a decorrelating linear transform in the forward pass, or a set of recurrent dynamics in which all updates are Hebbian and rely only upon locally available signals. The (recurrent) decorrelation method we discover aligns closely with proposed methods for inhibitory learning and homeostatic plasticity in the brain. Notably, our transform requires no matrix inverse, no matrix decomposition, and no information beyond that which is available at an individual synapse. It can therefore be applied in distributed and physically constrained systems, including neuromorphic hardware and nervous systems, where existing preconditioners cannot. We demonstrate its effectiveness empirically in convolutional and residual network models while significantly improving a range of approximate biologically plausible methods for credit assignment.

cs.LG↗