andropar/relaion2b-natural

ReLAION-2B Natural Scores

Naturalness scores for 2.1 billion images from ReLAION-2B-en-research-safe, predicting how "natural" or "photographic" an image looks versus artificial/rendered content.

Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the dataset (streaming recommended due to size)
ds = load_dataset("andropar/relaion2b-natural", streaming=True)

# Filter to natural images only
for row in ds['train']:
    if row['natural_score'] and row['natural_score'] > 0.7:
        print(row['url'])  # Natural photograph URL

Overview

Total rows	~2.1 billion
Score range	0.0 (artificial) to 1.0 (natural)
Recommended threshold	> 0.7 for natural photographs
Format	Parquet (Snappy compressed)
Source	ReLAION-2B-en-research-safe

Example Images

Examples of images at different natural score ranges:

Non-natural (score < 0.3): Graphics, logos, text overlays, screenshots

Low (score 0.3 - 0.5): Mixed content, product images, some editing

Medium (score 0.5 - 0.7): Mostly natural with some artifacts

High (score 0.7 - 0.85): Natural photographs

Very high (score 0.85 - 1.0): Clean natural photographs

Thumbnails shown solely to illustrate dataset characteristics. Source: ReLAION-2B-en-research-safe (Apache 2.0). Underlying images remain under the copyright of their original creators.

Dataset Structure

Column	Type	Description
url	string	Image URL from ReLAION-2B
natural_score	float32	Naturalness prediction (0-1), null if no match found in original LAION-2B-en

Files are named relaion2b_natural_part-*.snappy.parquet.

How the Scores Were Created

1. Manual labeling: 200k images from LAION-2B-en were labeled in an active learning loop. Selection criteria for "natural" images:

   • No watermarks, logos, or banners
   • No heavy editing (B&W filters, high saturation, photoshopping)
   • Must be a real-world scene or object

2. Classifier training: Logistic regression on CLIP ViT-L/14 features (768-dim)

3. Scoring: Applied classifier to all LAION-2B-en embeddings

4. Matching: URLs matched to ReLAION-2B-en-research-safe (some URLs have null scores if not found in original dataset)

Usage Examples

Filter a subset with pandas:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_parquet("relaion2b_natural_part-000.snappy.parquet")

# High-quality natural images
natural = df[df['natural_score'] > 0.7]
print(f"Found {len(natural):,} natural images")

# Very high confidence
very_natural = df[df['natural_score'] > 0.9]

Load all files:

from datasets import load_dataset

# Full dataset (streaming)
ds = load_dataset("andropar/relaion2b-natural", streaming=True)

# Or load specific files
import glob
files = glob.glob("relaion2b_natural_part-*.snappy.parquet")
df_all = pd.concat([pd.read_parquet(f) for f in files])

Combine with image downloading:

import requests
from PIL import Image
from io import BytesIO

def download_image(url):
    resp = requests.get(url, timeout=10)
    return Image.open(BytesIO(resp.content))

# Get natural image URLs and download
natural_urls = df[df['natural_score'] > 0.8]['url'].tolist()
images = [download_image(url) for url in natural_urls[:100]]

Use Cases

• Dataset filtering: Remove non-photographic content from web-scraped image datasets
• Quality assessment: Score images for naturalness before model training
• Research: Study distribution of natural vs. artificial images on the web
• Preprocessing: Filter training data for vision models that need natural photographs

Related Datasets

• andropar/relaion2b-natural-embeddings - CLIP ViT-H/14 embeddings for the ~500M images with natural_score > 0.7

Licensing / Content

This repository contains only metadata (URLs and natural scores). No images are distributed.

• The underlying images are hosted by third-party websites and remain under their original copyrights and terms of use.
• Our additions (naturalness scores, documentation) are released under CC-BY 4.0.
• This dataset is based on ReLAION-2B-en-research-safe, which is licensed under Apache 2.0.
• Please check license compatibility for any commercial usage.

Limitations

• "Naturalness" reflects our specific labeling criteria - may not match your definition
• These are ML predictions, not ground truth labels
• Some URLs may be broken or point to different/removed images
• Null scores indicate URLs not found in original LAION-2B-en dataset

Citation

@inproceedings{
  roth2025how,
  title={How to sample the world for understanding the visual system},
  author={Johannes Roth and Martin N Hebart},
  booktitle={8th Annual Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience},
  year={2025},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=T9k6KkZoca}
}

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Questions or issues? Open a discussion!

This dataset is intended for research purposes. Verify license compatibility before commercial use.