datasets 4.2.0


pip install datasets

  Latest version

Released: Oct 09, 2025

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Author: HuggingFace Inc.
Requires Python: >=3.9.0

Classifiers

Development Status
  • 5 - Production/Stable

Intended Audience
  • Developers
  • Education
  • Science/Research

License
  • OSI Approved :: Apache Software License

Operating System
  • OS Independent

Programming Language
  • Python :: 3
  • Python :: 3.9
  • Python :: 3.10
  • Python :: 3.11

Topic
  • Scientific/Engineering :: Artificial Intelligence

Hugging Face Datasets Library

Build GitHub Documentation GitHub release Number of datasets Contributor Covenant DOI

๐Ÿค— Datasets is a lightweight library providing two main features:

  • one-line dataloaders for many public datasets: one-liners to download and pre-process any of the number of datasets major public datasets (image datasets, audio datasets, text datasets in 467 languages and dialects, etc.) provided on the HuggingFace Datasets Hub. With a simple command like squad_dataset = load_dataset("rajpurkar/squad"), get any of these datasets ready to use in a dataloader for training/evaluating a ML model (Numpy/Pandas/PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX),
  • efficient data pre-processing: simple, fast and reproducible data pre-processing for the public datasets as well as your own local datasets in CSV, JSON, text, PNG, JPEG, WAV, MP3, Parquet, HDF5, etc. With simple commands like processed_dataset = dataset.map(process_example), efficiently prepare the dataset for inspection and ML model evaluation and training.

๐ŸŽ“ Documentation ๐Ÿ”Ž Find a dataset in the Hub ๐ŸŒŸ Share a dataset on the Hub

๐Ÿค— Datasets is designed to let the community easily add and share new datasets.

๐Ÿค— Datasets has many additional interesting features:

  • Thrive on large datasets: ๐Ÿค— Datasets naturally frees the user from RAM memory limitation, all datasets are memory-mapped using an efficient zero-serialization cost backend (Apache Arrow).
  • Smart caching: never wait for your data to process several times.
  • Lightweight and fast with a transparent and pythonic API (multi-processing/caching/memory-mapping).
  • Built-in interoperability with NumPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow 2, JAX, Pandas, Polars and more.
  • Native support for audio, image and video data.
  • Enable streaming mode to save disk space and start iterating over the dataset immediately.

๐Ÿค— Datasets originated from a fork of the awesome TensorFlow Datasets and the HuggingFace team want to deeply thank the TensorFlow Datasets team for building this amazing library.

Installation

With pip

๐Ÿค— Datasets can be installed from PyPi and has to be installed in a virtual environment (venv or conda for instance)

pip install datasets

With conda

๐Ÿค— Datasets can be installed using conda as follows:

conda install -c huggingface -c conda-forge datasets

Follow the installation pages of TensorFlow and PyTorch to see how to install them with conda.

For more details on installation, check the installation page in the documentation: https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/installation

Installation to use with Machine Learning & Data frameworks frameworks

If you plan to use ๐Ÿค— Datasets with PyTorch (2.0+), TensorFlow (2.6+) or JAX (3.14+) you should also install PyTorch, TensorFlow or JAX. ๐Ÿค— Datasets is also well integrated with data frameworks like PyArrow, Pandas, Polars and Spark, which should be installed separately.

For more details on using the library with these frameworks, check the quick start page in the documentation: https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/quickstart

Usage

๐Ÿค— Datasets is made to be very simple to use - the API is centered around a single function, datasets.load_dataset(dataset_name, **kwargs), that instantiates a dataset.

This library can be used for text/image/audio/etc. datasets. Here is an example to load a text dataset:

Here is a quick example:

from datasets import load_dataset

# Print all the available datasets
from huggingface_hub import list_datasets
print([dataset.id for dataset in list_datasets()])

# Load a dataset and print the first example in the training set
squad_dataset = load_dataset('rajpurkar/squad')
print(squad_dataset['train'][0])

# Process the dataset - add a column with the length of the context texts
dataset_with_length = squad_dataset.map(lambda x: {"length": len(x["context"])})

# Process the dataset - tokenize the context texts (using a tokenizer from the ๐Ÿค— Transformers library)
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('bert-base-cased')

tokenized_dataset = squad_dataset.map(lambda x: tokenizer(x['context']), batched=True)

If your dataset is bigger than your disk or if you don't want to wait to download the data, you can use streaming:

# If you want to use the dataset immediately and efficiently stream the data as you iterate over the dataset
image_dataset = load_dataset('timm/imagenet-1k-wds', streaming=True)
for example in image_dataset["train"]:
    break

For more details on using the library, check the quick start page in the documentation: https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/quickstart and the specific pages on:

Add a new dataset to the Hub

We have a very detailed step-by-step guide to add a new dataset to the number of datasets datasets already provided on the HuggingFace Datasets Hub.

You can find:

Disclaimers

You can use ๐Ÿค— Datasets to load datasets based on versioned git repositories maintained by the dataset authors. For reproducibility reasons, we ask users to pin the revision of the repositories they use.

If you're a dataset owner and wish to update any part of it (description, citation, license, etc.), or do not want your dataset to be included in the Hugging Face Hub, please get in touch by opening a discussion or a pull request in the Community tab of the dataset page. Thanks for your contribution to the ML community!

BibTeX

If you want to cite our ๐Ÿค— Datasets library, you can use our paper:

@inproceedings{lhoest-etal-2021-datasets,
    title = "Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing",
    author = "Lhoest, Quentin  and
      Villanova del Moral, Albert  and
      Jernite, Yacine  and
      Thakur, Abhishek  and
      von Platen, Patrick  and
      Patil, Suraj  and
      Chaumond, Julien  and
      Drame, Mariama  and
      Plu, Julien  and
      Tunstall, Lewis  and
      Davison, Joe  and
      {\v{S}}a{\v{s}}ko, Mario  and
      Chhablani, Gunjan  and
      Malik, Bhavitvya  and
      Brandeis, Simon  and
      Le Scao, Teven  and
      Sanh, Victor  and
      Xu, Canwen  and
      Patry, Nicolas  and
      McMillan-Major, Angelina  and
      Schmid, Philipp  and
      Gugger, Sylvain  and
      Delangue, Cl{\'e}ment  and
      Matussi{\`e}re, Th{\'e}o  and
      Debut, Lysandre  and
      Bekman, Stas  and
      Cistac, Pierric  and
      Goehringer, Thibault  and
      Mustar, Victor  and
      Lagunas, Fran{\c{c}}ois  and
      Rush, Alexander  and
      Wolf, Thomas",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.21",
    pages = "175--184",
    abstract = "The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.",
    eprint={2109.02846},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.CL},
}

If you need to cite a specific version of our ๐Ÿค— Datasets library for reproducibility, you can use the corresponding version Zenodo DOI from this list.

4.2.0 Oct 09, 2025
4.1.1 Sep 18, 2025
4.1.0 Sep 15, 2025
4.0.0 Jul 09, 2025
3.6.0 May 07, 2025
3.5.1 Apr 28, 2025
3.5.0 Mar 27, 2025
3.4.1 Mar 17, 2025
3.4.0 Mar 14, 2025
3.3.2 Feb 20, 2025
3.3.1 Feb 17, 2025
3.3.0 Feb 14, 2025
3.2.0 Dec 10, 2024
3.1.0 Oct 31, 2024
3.0.2 Oct 22, 2024
3.0.1 Sep 26, 2024
3.0.0 Sep 11, 2024
2.21.0 Aug 14, 2024
2.20.0 Jun 13, 2024
2.19.2 Jun 03, 2024
2.19.1 May 06, 2024
2.19.0 Apr 19, 2024
2.18.0 Mar 01, 2024
2.17.1 Feb 19, 2024
2.17.0 Feb 09, 2024
2.16.1 Dec 30, 2023
2.16.0 Dec 22, 2023
2.15.0 Nov 16, 2023
2.14.7 Nov 15, 2023
2.14.6 Oct 23, 2023
2.14.5 Sep 06, 2023
2.14.4 Aug 08, 2023
2.14.3 Aug 03, 2023
2.14.2 Jul 31, 2023
2.14.1 Jul 27, 2023
2.14.0 Jul 24, 2023
2.13.2 Sep 06, 2023
2.13.1 Jun 22, 2023
2.13.0 Jun 14, 2023
2.12.0 Apr 28, 2023
2.11.0 Mar 29, 2023
2.10.1 Feb 28, 2023
2.10.0 Feb 22, 2023
2.9.0 Jan 26, 2023
2.8.0 Dec 19, 2022
2.7.1 Nov 22, 2022
2.7.0 Nov 16, 2022
2.6.2 Nov 22, 2022
2.6.1 Oct 14, 2022
2.6.0 Oct 13, 2022
2.5.2 Oct 05, 2022
2.5.1 Sep 21, 2022
2.5.0 Sep 21, 2022
2.4.0 Jul 25, 2022
2.3.2 Jun 15, 2022
2.3.1 Jun 15, 2022
2.3.0 Jun 14, 2022
2.2.2 May 20, 2022
2.2.1 May 11, 2022
2.2.0 May 10, 2022
2.1.0 Apr 14, 2022
2.0.0 Mar 15, 2022
1.18.4 Mar 07, 2022
1.18.3 Feb 02, 2022
1.18.2 Jan 28, 2022
1.18.1 Jan 26, 2022
1.18.0 Jan 21, 2022
1.17.0 Dec 21, 2021
1.16.1 Nov 26, 2021
1.16.0 Nov 26, 2021
1.15.1 Nov 02, 2021
1.15.0 Nov 02, 2021
1.14.0 Oct 19, 2021
1.13.3 Oct 15, 2021
1.13.2 Oct 14, 2021
1.13.1 Oct 14, 2021
1.13.0 Oct 13, 2021
1.12.1 Sep 15, 2021
1.12.0 Sep 13, 2021
1.11.0 Jul 30, 2021
1.10.2 Jul 22, 2021
1.10.1 Jul 22, 2021
1.10.0 Jul 21, 2021
1.9.0 Jul 05, 2021
1.8.0 Jun 08, 2021
1.7.0 May 27, 2021
1.6.2 Apr 30, 2021
1.6.1 Apr 26, 2021
1.6.0 Apr 20, 2021
1.5.0 Mar 18, 2021
1.4.1 Mar 04, 2021
1.4.0 Mar 03, 2021
1.3.0 Feb 15, 2021
1.2.1 Jan 13, 2021
1.2.0 Jan 04, 2021
1.1.3 Nov 19, 2020
1.1.2 Oct 06, 2020
1.1.1 Oct 06, 2020
1.1.0 Oct 02, 2020
1.0.2 Sep 21, 2020
1.0.1 Sep 11, 2020
1.0.0 Sep 10, 2020
0.0.9 Aug 18, 2015

Wheel compatibility matrix

Platform Python 3
any

Files in release

Extras:
Dependencies:
filelock
numpy (>=1.17)
pyarrow (>=21.0.0)
dill (<0.4.1,>=0.3.0)
pandas
requests (>=2.32.2)
httpx (<1.0.0)
tqdm (>=4.66.3)
xxhash
multiprocess (<0.70.17)
fsspec[http] (<=2025.9.0,>=2023.1.0)
huggingface-hub (<2.0,>=0.25.0)
packaging
pyyaml (>=5.1)