Installation

With pip

🤗 Datasets can be installed from PyPi and should be installed in a virtual environment (venv or conda for instance):

pip install datasets

For the latest development version:

pip install "datasets @ git+https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.git"

With conda

conda install -c huggingface -c conda-forge datasets

Optional dependencies

🤗 Datasets supports various optional features via extras:

# For audio (torchcodec)
pip install datasets[audio]

# For image/video (Pillow, torchcodec)
pip install datasets[vision]

# For PDFs/NIfTI (pdfplumber, nibabel)
pip install datasets[pdfs,nibabel]

# For PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX integration
pip install datasets[torch,tensorflow,jax]

For more details on installation, check the installation page.

Quick Start

🤗 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.

Here is a quick example:

from datasets import load_dataset

# 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"])})

# Tokenize the context texts (using a tokenizer from the 🤗 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)

# Tokenize chat conversations with a chat template (using a model that supports chat templates)
# This is useful for fine-tuning instruction/chat models

# Load a popular chat dataset (ultrachat_200k contains ~200k AI assistant conversations)
chat_dataset = load_dataset('HuggingFaceH4/ultrachat_200k', split='train_sft')

chat_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct')

def tokenize_chat(examples):
    # Apply the chat template and tokenize in one step
    return chat_tokenizer.apply_chat_template(examples["messages"])

tokenized_chat_dataset = chat_dataset.map(tokenize_chat, batched=True)

Streaming mode

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

# Stream the dataset without downloading anything
image_dataset = load_dataset('timm/imagenet-1k-wds', streaming=True)
for example in image_dataset["train"]:
    print(example["image"])
    break

Multi-modal data

🤗 Datasets supports a wide variety of data types out of the box:

# Audio dataset
dataset = load_dataset("openslr/librispeech_asr", "clean")

# Image dataset
dataset = load_dataset("ILSVRC/imagenet-1k")

# Video dataset
dataset = load_dataset("Shofo/shofo-tiktok-general-small")

# PDF documents
dataset = load_dataset("pixparse/pdfa-eng-wds")

# NIfTI (3D medical imaging)
dataset = load_dataset("dartbrains/localizer", "betas")

From local files

# Load from local CSV
dataset = load_dataset('csv', data_files='my_data.csv')

# Load from local Parquet
dataset = load_dataset('parquet', data_files='data/*.parquet')

# Load from a local directory (auto-detect format)
dataset = load_dataset('./path/to/data')

From Python objects

from datasets import Dataset

# From a dictionary
dataset = Dataset.from_dict({"text": ["Hello world", "How are you?"]})

# From a list
dataset = Dataset.from_list([{"text": "Hello world"}, {"text": "How are you?"}])

# From Pandas
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({"col1": [1, 2, 3], "col2": ["a", "b", "c"]})
dataset = Dataset.from_pandas(df)

# From a generator
def gen():
    for i in range(10):
        yield {"value": i}
dataset = Dataset.from_generator(gen)

For more details on using the library, check the quick start guide and the specific pages on:

• Loading a dataset
• What's in a Dataset
• Processing data with 🤗 Datasets
  • Processing audio data
  • Processing image data
  • Processing text data
  • Processing PDF data
  • Processing video data
• Streaming a dataset

Core Classes

The library provides two main dataset classes:

Both are wrapped in DatasetDict / IterableDatasetDict for multi-split datasets (e.g., train/test/val).

Add a new dataset to the Hub

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

You can find:

• how to upload a dataset to the Hub using your web browser or Python and also
• how to upload it using Git.

Disclaimers

You can use 🤗 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!

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see our Contributing Guide for details on:

• How to submit issues and pull requests
• Code style guidelines (we use Ruff)
• Testing requirements
• Documentation standards

BibTeX

If you want to cite our 🤗 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, Al