nemo-curator

# NeMo Curator - GPU-Accelerated Data Curation

NVIDIA's toolkit for preparing high-quality training data for LLMs.

## When to use NeMo Curator

**Use NeMo Curator when:**
- Preparing LLM training data from web scrapes (Common Crawl)
- Need fast deduplication (16× faster than CPU)
- Curating multi-modal datasets (text, images, video, audio)
- Filtering low-quality or toxic content
- Scaling data processing across GPU cluster

**Performance**:
- **16× faster** fuzzy deduplication (8TB RedPajama v2)
- **40% lower TCO** vs CPU alternatives
- **Near-linear scaling** across GPU nodes

**Use alternatives instead**:
- **datatrove**: CPU-based, open-source data processing
- **dolma**: Allen AI's data toolkit
- **Ray Data**: General ML data processing (no curation focus)

## Quick start

### Installation

```bash
# Text curation (CUDA 12)
uv pip install "nemo-curator[text_cuda12]"

# All modalities
uv pip install "nemo-curator[all_cuda12]"

# CPU-only (slower)
uv pip install "nemo-curator[cpu]"
```

### Basic text curation pipeline

```python
from nemo_curator import ScoreFilter, Modify
from nemo_curator.datasets import DocumentDataset
import pandas as pd

# Load data
df = pd.DataFrame({"text": ["Good document", "Bad doc", "Excellent text"]})
dataset = DocumentDataset(df)

# Quality filtering
def quality_score(doc):
    return len(doc["text"].split()) > 5  # Filter short docs

filtered = ScoreFilter(quality_score)(dataset)

# Deduplication
from nemo_curator.modules import ExactDuplicates
deduped = ExactDuplicates()(filtered)

# Save
deduped.to_parquet("curated_data/")
```

## Data curation pipeline

### Stage 1: Quality filtering

```python
from nemo_curator.filters import (
    WordCountFilter,
    RepeatedLinesFilter,
    UrlRatioFilter,
    NonAlphaNumericFilter
)

# Apply 30+ heuristic filters
from nemo_curator import ScoreFilter

# Word count filter
dataset = dataset.filter(WordCountFilter(min_words=50, max_words=100000))

# Remove repetitive content
dataset = dataset.filter(RepeatedLinesFilter(max_repeated_line_fraction=0.3))

# URL ratio filter
dataset = dataset.filter(UrlRatioFilter(max_url_ratio=0.2))
```

### Stage 2: Deduplication

**Exact deduplication**:
```python
from nemo_curator.modules import ExactDuplicates

# Remove exact duplicates
deduped = ExactDuplicates(id_field="id", text_field="text")(dataset)
```

**Fuzzy deduplication** (16× faster on GPU):
```python
from nemo_curator.modules import FuzzyDuplicates

# MinHash + LSH deduplication
fuzzy_dedup = FuzzyDuplicates(
    id_field="id",
    text_field="text",
    num_hashes=260,      # MinHash parameters
    num_buckets=20,
    hash_method="md5"
)

deduped = fuzzy_dedup(dataset)
```

**Semantic deduplication**:
```python
from nemo_curator.modules import SemanticDuplicates

# Embedding-based deduplication
semantic_dedup = SemanticDuplicates(
    id_field="id",
    text_field="text",
    embedding_model="sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2",
    threshold=0.8  # Cosine similarity threshold
)

deduped = semantic_dedup(dataset)
```

### Stage 3: PII redaction

```python
from nemo_curator.modules import Modify
from nemo_curator.modifiers import PIIRedactor

# Redact personally identifiable information
pii_redactor = PIIRedactor(
    supported_entities=["EMAIL_ADDRESS", "PHONE_NUMBER", "PERSON", "LOCATION"],
    anonymize_action="replace"  # or "redact"
)

redacted = Modify(pii_redactor)(dataset)
```

### Stage 4: Classifier filtering

```python
from nemo_curator.classifiers import QualityClassifier

# Quality classification
quality_clf = QualityClassifier(
    model_path="nvidia/quality-classifier-deberta",
    batch_size=256,
    device="cuda"
)

# Filter low-quality documents
high_quality = dataset.filter(lambda doc: quality_clf(doc["text"]) > 0.5)
```

## GPU acceleration

### GPU vs CPU performance

| Operation | CPU (16 cores) | GPU (A100) | Speedup |
|-----------|----------------|------------|---------|
| Fuzzy dedup (8TB) | 120 hours | 7.5 hours | 16× |
| Exact dedup (1TB) | 8 hours | 0.5 hours | 16× |
| Quality filtering | 2 hours | 0.2 hours | 10× |

### Multi-GPU scaling

```python
from nemo_curator import get_client
import dask_cuda

# Initialize GPU cluster
client = get_client(cluster_type="gpu", n_workers=8)

# Process with 8 GPUs
deduped = FuzzyDuplicates(...)(dataset)
```

## Multi-modal curation

### Image curation

```python
from nemo_curator.image import (
    AestheticFilter,
    NSFWFilter,
    CLIPEmbedder
)

# Aesthetic scoring
aesthetic_filter = AestheticFilter(threshold=5.0)
filtered_images = aesthetic_filter(image_dataset)

# NSFW detection
nsfw_filter = NSFWFilter(threshold=0.9)
safe_images = nsfw_filter(filtered_images)

# Generate CLIP embeddings
clip_embedder = CLIPEmbedder(model="openai/clip-vit-base-patch32")
image_embeddings = clip_embedder(safe_images)
```

### Video curation

```python
from nemo_curator.video import (
    SceneDetector,
    ClipExtractor,
    InternVideo2Embedder
)

# Detect scenes
scene_detector = SceneDetector(threshold=27.0)
scenes = scene_detector(video_dataset)

# Extract clips
clip_extractor = ClipExtractor(min_duration=2.0, max_duration=10.0)
clips = clip_extractor(scenes)

# Generate embeddings
video_embedder = InternVideo2Embedder()
video_embeddings = video_embedder(clips)
```

### Audio curation

```python
from nemo_curator.audio import (
    ASRInference,
    WERFilter,
    DurationFilter
)

# ASR transcription
asr = ASRInference(model="nvidia/stt_en_fastconformer_hybrid_large_pc")
transcribed = asr(audio_dataset)

# Filter by WER (word error rate)
wer_filter = WERFilter(max_wer=0.3)
high_quality_audio = wer_filter(transcribed)

# Duration filtering
duration_filter = DurationFilter(min_duration=1.0, max_duration=30.0)
filtered_audio = duration_filter(high_quality_audio)
```

## Common patterns

### Web scrape curation (Common Crawl)

```python
from nemo_curator import ScoreFilter, Modify
from nemo_curator.filters import *
from nemo_curator.modules import *
from nemo_