The archive of a thousand rooms
Author: Mihai Nan
🔢🧮 The archive of a thousand cameras 📚📷
📖 Description 🌌
At the heart of a secret research institute lies The archive of a thousand Cameras, an underground labyrinth with chambers monitored 24/7 by smart cameras. Each room captures objects, furniture, electronic devices, or symbols of mysterious experiments.
For unknown reasons, some of the archive data have lost their numerical labels: recordings show the question “how many objects of type X are in the image?”, but the answer is missing. Researchers tried to manually reconstruct the information, but thousands of images are impossible to process without help.
This is where you step in.
You have been entrusted with the role of a “Numerical Visual Analyst”, the only person authorized to build a multimodal model capable of looking at an image, understanding the question, and correctly answering with a single number.
Your mission is to use your expertise in Artificial Intelligence algorithms to restore the archive.
📁 Dataset Structure
There are two main files and a folder with images.
1. train.csv — Training Data
| sample_id | question | answer | image_id |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRAIN0000 | how many chairs are there | 6 | image888 |
| TRAIN0001 | how many pictures are on the wall | 2 | image942 |
| TRAIN0002 | how many chairs are there | 10 | image1404 |
2. test.csv — Data without answers
| sample_id | question | image_id |
|---|---|---|
| TEST0000 | how many drawers are there | image1362 |
| TEST0001 | how many televisions are there | image169 |
| TEST0002 | how many flags are visible | image1326 |
3. Images directory
images/
image888.png
image942.png
image1404.png
image1362.png
image169.png
image1326.png
📤 Submission Format
The submission.csv file should have the following format:
| sample_id | answer |
|---|---|
| TEST0000 | 4 |
| TEST0001 | 1 |
| TEST0002 | 3 |
🎯 Evaluation Metric
Since the answers are numbers, the official evaluation uses MAE:
The final score is calculated based on the MAE obtained using the following rules:
- MAE ≤ 0.2 → 100 points
- MAE ≥ 1 → 0 points
- For intermediate values, the score is scaled proportionally between 0 and 100.