What are the common datasets used for deep learning?

Common datasets in deep learning serve as benchmarks for training and evaluating models across tasks like image recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and speech recognition. These datasets are widely used because they provide standardized, well-structured data that allows developers to compare model performance and iterate on techniques. They vary in size, complexity, and domain, ensuring suitability for different project needs. Below, I’ll outline key datasets grouped by application area, their structure, and typical use cases.

In computer vision, MNIST is a foundational dataset containing 60,000 grayscale images of handwritten digits (0–9) for classification tasks. While simple, it’s often used to test basic model architectures. For more complexity, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 offer 60,000 32x32 color images across 10 or 100 object classes, helping evaluate models on small-scale color recognition. ImageNet, a large-scale dataset with over 14 million labeled images spanning 20,000 categories, is pivotal for training deep convolutional networks like ResNet. For object detection and segmentation, COCO (Common Objects in Context) provides 330,000 images with annotations for 80 object types, while PASCAL VOC includes bounding boxes and segmentation masks for 20 object classes, commonly used in early detection models.

For NLP tasks, Penn Treebank is a standard for part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing, with annotated text from the Wall Street Journal. GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) consolidates nine tasks like sentiment analysis and textual entailment, serving as a benchmark for models like BERT. IMDb Reviews, a dataset of 50,000 movie reviews labeled by sentiment, is widely used for binary sentiment classification. SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset) contains 100,000 question-answer pairs based on Wikipedia articles, testing reading comprehension. These datasets help developers train models to understand context, generate text, or answer questions.

Beyond vision and NLP, datasets like LibriSpeech (1,000 hours of speech audio) and TIMIT (phoneme recognition) are used for speech-to-text tasks. In reinforcement learning, the Atari 2600 Benchmark provides game environments for training agents. For medical imaging, CheXpert includes 224,316 chest X-rays labeled for 14 pathologies, aiding in automated diagnosis. These datasets address domain-specific challenges, such as handling audio signals or sparse annotations in medical data. By leveraging these resources, developers can focus on refining models rather than data collection, accelerating progress across domains.