A (DatasetInfo) object contains dataset metadata like version etc.

Adding pre-existing attributes described here: Create a dataset loading script. But apparently you can’t add custom ones through it.

Option1 - subclass DatasetBuilder

Build and load touches the topic and suggests subclassing BuilderConfig, it’s the class that then is used by the DatasetBulider.

Option2 - you can subclass the Dataset

Fine-tuning with custom datasets — transformers 3.2.0 documentation

Example shown, not for this problem, and I don’t really like it but whatever.

The best solution

Ended up just not adding metadata, I basically needed things that can be recovered anyway from a Features object with ClassLabels.

No easy support for custom metadata is really strange to me - sounds like something quite useful to many “Dataset created with version XX of converter program” and I see no reason why HF doesn’t do this.

Strong intuitive feeling that I’m misunderstanding the logic on some level and the answer I need is closer in spirit to “why would you want to add custom attributes to X, you could just ….”

Does everyone use separate key/values in the dataset itself or something?

EDIT: https://huggingface.co/datasets/allocine/edit/main/README.md cool example.