Ai

Fashion-MNIST is a modern drop-in replacement for MNIST. Released by Zalando Research in 2017, it packs 70 000 tiny grayscale images of apparel—sneakers, shirts, coats—into a lightweight benchmark. Its familiar format keeps setup trivial, while richer visuals pose a tougher challenge.

Zalando’s quality-control cameras captured millions of 96 × 96 product shots. Han Xiao et al. down-sampled these to 28 × 28, grouped them into ten balanced classes, and open-sourced the result. The idea: upgrade MNIST difficulty without touching loaders or evaluation scripts.