Use with Polars
This document is a quick introduction to using datasets with Polars, with a particular focus on how to process
datasets using Polars functions, and how to convert a dataset to Polars or from Polars.
This is particularly useful as it allows fast zero-copy operations, since both datasets and Polars use Arrow under the hood.
Dataset format
By default, datasets return regular Python objects: integers, floats, strings, lists, etc.
To get Polars DataFrames or Series instead, you can set the format of the dataset to polars using Dataset.with_format():
>>> from datasets import Dataset
>>> data = {"col_0": ["a", "b", "c", "d"], "col_1": [0., 0., 1., 1.]}
>>> ds = Dataset.from_dict(data)
>>> ds = ds.with_format("polars")
>>> ds[0] # pl.DataFrame
shape: (1, 2)
┌───────┬───────┐
│ col_0 ┆ col_1 │
│ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ f64 │
╞═══════╪═══════╡
│ a ┆ 0.0 │
└───────┴───────┘
>>> ds[:2] # pl.DataFrame
shape: (2, 2)
┌───────┬───────┐
│ col_0 ┆ col_1 │
│ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ f64 │
╞═══════╪═══════╡
│ a ┆ 0.0 │
│ b ┆ 0.0 │
└───────┴───────┘
>>> ds["data"] # pl.Series
shape: (4,)
Series: 'col_0' [str]
[
"a"
"b"
"c"
"d"
]This also works for IterableDataset objects obtained e.g. using load_dataset(..., streaming=True):
>>> ds = ds.with_format("polars")
>>> for df in ds.iter(batch_size=2):
... print(df)
... break
shape: (2, 2)
┌───────┬───────┐
│ col_0 ┆ col_1 │
│ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ f64 │
╞═══════╪═══════╡
│ a ┆ 0.0 │
│ b ┆ 0.0 │
└───────┴───────┘Process data
Polars functions are generally faster than regular hand-written python functions, and therefore they are a good option to optimize data processing. You can use Polars functions to process a dataset in Dataset.map() or Dataset.filter():
>>> import polars as pl
>>> from datasets import Dataset
>>> data = {"col_0": ["a", "b", "c", "d"], "col_1": [0., 0., 1., 1.]}
>>> ds = Dataset.from_dict(data)
>>> ds = ds.with_format("polars")
>>> ds = ds.map(lambda df: df.with_columns(pl.col("col_1").add(1).alias("col_2")), batched=True)
>>> ds[:2]
shape: (2, 3)
┌───────┬───────┬───────┐
│ col_0 ┆ col_1 ┆ col_2 │
│ --- ┆ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ f64 ┆ f64 │
╞═══════╪═══════╪═══════╡
│ a ┆ 0.0 ┆ 1.0 │
│ b ┆ 0.0 ┆ 1.0 │
└───────┴───────┴───────┘
>>> ds = ds.filter(lambda df: df["col_0"] == "b", batched=True)
>>> ds[0]
shape: (1, 3)
┌───────┬───────┬───────┐
│ col_0 ┆ col_1 ┆ col_2 │
│ --- ┆ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ f64 ┆ f64 │
╞═══════╪═══════╪═══════╡
│ b ┆ 0.0 ┆ 1.0 │
└───────┴───────┴───────┘We use batched=True because it is faster to process batches of data in Polars rather than row by row. It’s also possible to use batch_size= in map() to set the size of each df.
This also works for IterableDataset.map() and IterableDataset.filter().
Example: data extraction
Many functions are available in Polars and for any data type: string, floats, integers, etc. You can find the full list here. Those functions are written in Rust and run on batches of data which enables fast data processing.
Here is an example that shows a 2.5x speed boost using Polars instead of a regular python function to extract solutions from a LLM reasoning dataset:
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("ServiceNow-AI/R1-Distill-SFT", "v0", split="train")
# Using a regular python function
pattern = re.compile("boxed\\{(.*)\\}")
result_ds = ds.map(lambda x: {"value_solution": m.group(1) if (m:=pattern.search(x["solution"])) else None})
# Time: 10s
# Using a Polars function
expr = pl.col("solution").str.extract("boxed\\{(.*)\\}").alias("value_solution")
result_ds = ds.with_format("polars").map(lambda df: df.with_columns(expr), batched=True)
# Time: 2sImport or Export from Polars
To import data from Polars, you can use Dataset.from_polars():
ds = Dataset.from_polars(df)
And you can use Dataset.to_polars() to export a Dataset to a Polars DataFrame:
df = Dataset.from_polars(ds)