Learning representations of learning representations

The ICLR dataset is a complete scrape of ICLR submissions from OpenReview. It contains 24,445 ICLR submissions from 2017 to 2024.

The dataset is described in González-Márquez & Kobak, Learning representations of learning representations, DMLR workshop at ICLR 2024. Please cite as follows:

@inproceedings{gonzalez2024learning,
  title={Learning representations of learning representations},
  author={Gonz{\'a}lez-M{\'a}rquez, Rita and Kobak, Dmitry},
  booktitle={Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR) workshop at ICLR 2024},
  year={2024}
}

Dataset description

Each sample corresponds to a submitted article to the ICLR conference and includes as features:

• Year
• OpenReview ID
• Title
• Abstract
• Authors
• Decision
• Scores
• Keywords
• Labels

To label the dataset, we relied on the author-provided keywords and used them to assign papers to 45 non-overlapping classes. We combined some keywords together into one class (e.g. attention and transformer), disregarded very broad keywords (e.g. deep learning), and assigned papers to rarer classes first. Using this procedure, we ended up labeling 53.4% of all papers.

Note that 26 submissions with placeholder abstracts (below 100 characters) are excluded.

Descriptive statistics

• Dataset: Abstracts submitted to ICLR in 2017-2024 (24,445 papers).
• Labels: based on keywords, 45 classes, 53.4% labeled papers.
• Reviewers: Reviewed papers had on average 3.7 reviews, with 93% having either 3 or 4 reviews.
• Scores: Across all 244,226 possible pairs of reviews of the same paper, the correlation coefficient between scores was 0.40.
• Basic statistics:

Benchmark

We propose to use the ICLR dataset as a benchmark for embedding quality. The ICLR dataset is not part of the training data of many of the existing off-the-shelf models, therefore it makes a good evaluation dataset. We found that on this dataset, bag-of-words representation outperforms most dedicated sentence transformer models in terms of kNN classification accuracy, and the top performing language models barely outperform TF-IDF. We see this as a challenge for the NLP community: to train a language model without using the labels (self-supervised) that produces a sentence embedding that would substantially surpass a naive bag-of-words representation in kNN accuracy.

Models performance

Model	High-dim.	2D
TF-IDF	59.2%	52.0%
SVD	58.9%	55.9%
SVD, $L^2$ norm.	60.7%	56.7%
SimCSE	45.1%	36.3%
DeCLUTR-sci	52.7%	47.1%
SciNCL	58.8%	54.9%
SPECTER2	58.8%	54.1%
ST5	57.0%	52.6%
SBERT	61.6%	56.8%
Cohere v3	61.1%	56.4%
OpenAI v3	62.3%	57.1%

Evaluation code

Do you want to evaluate your model on the ICLR benchmark? Here is the code for it:

import numpy as np
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_validate

def knn_accuracy_cv(embeddings, labels):
    clf = KNeighborsClassifier(
        n_neighbors=10, algorithm="brute", n_jobs=-1, metric="euclidean"
    )
    cvresults = cross_validate(clf, embeddings, labels, cv=10)

    knn_accuracy = np.mean(cvresults["test_score"])

    return knn_accuracy

# load the dataset
iclr2024 = pd.read_parquet("path/to/file/iclr24v2.parquet")

# substitute for your embeddings
embeddings = TfidfVectorizer(sublinear_tf=True).fit_transform(
    iclr2024.abstract.to_list()
)

# compute the knn accuracy
knn_acc = knn_accuracy_cv(
    embeddings[iclr2024.labels != "unlabeled"],
    iclr2024.labels[iclr2024.labels != "unlabeled"],
)

Data version and maintenance

The dataset will be updated yearly.

Last Updated: 10/2025: added submissions to ICLR 2025 and new labels.

Labels are the same as for the 2024 dataset, except for:

• class contrastive learning and self-supervised learning have been merged.

• keyword semantic segmentation has been added to the class object detection.

• keyword multi-agent has been added to the class multi-agent RL.

• keywords bert and text generation have been added to the class LLMs.

• For all keywords where it makes sense, plural has been aded (e.g. adversarial attack and adversarial attacks).

• 6 new classes have been added:

  • safety with keywords ai safety and safety.
  • alignment with keywords alignment and rlhf.
  • code generation with keywords code generation and program synthesis.
  • autonomous driving.
  • knowledge graph.
  • neuroscience.