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Choosing Dev and Test Sets from the Same Distribution When Possible

Once dev and test sets are defined, a team will focus on improving dev set performance, so the dev set should reflect the task one wants to improve on the most. Having different dev and test set distributions can lead to a system that works well on the dev set but does poorly on the test set. If the dev and test sets came from the same distribution, that result would have a clear diagnosis: the system has overfit the dev set, and the obvious cure is to get more dev set data. If the dev and test sets come from different distributions, the options are less clear: the system may have overfit the dev set, the test set may be harder than the dev set, or the algorithm might be doing as well as could be expected.

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Updated 2026-05-26

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