AI Benchmarking for Science: Efforts from the MLCommons Science Working Group

With machine learning (ML) becoming a transformative tool for science, the scientific community needs a clear catalogue of ML techniques, and their relative benefits on various scientific problems, if they were to make significant advances in science using AI. Although this comes under the purview of benchmarking, conventional benchmarking initiatives are focused on performance, and as such, science, often becomes a secondary criteria.

In this paper, we describe a community effort from a working group, namely, MLCommons Science Working Group, in developing science-specific AI benchmarking for the international scientific community. Since the inception of the working group in 2020, the group has worked very collaboratively with a number of national laboratories, academic institutions and industries, across the world, and has developed four science-specific AI benchmarks. We will describe the overall process, the resulting benchmarks along with some initial results. We foresee that this initiative is likely to be very transformative for the AI for Science, and for performance-focused communities.