HUGO-CS: A Hybrid-Labeled, Uncertainty-Aware, General-Purpose, Observational Dataset for Cold Spray

TL;DR

HUGO-CS is a large, manually curated dataset of cold spray experiments derived from scientific literature, utilizing a hybrid LLM-based extraction framework with uncertainty-aware manual review, enabling better process modeling.

Contribution

This work introduces HUGO-CS, the largest cold spray dataset to date, and a novel hybrid extraction framework combining automation and manual validation for scientific literature data.

Findings

HUGO-CS contains 4,383 experiments, 30 times larger than previous datasets.

The hybrid extraction framework achieves high accuracy with reduced manual effort.

The dataset and code are publicly available for benchmarking and research.

Abstract

Cold spraying is an increasingly common approach for repairing and manufacturing components due to its solid-state manufacturing capabilities. However, process optimization remains difficult due to many interdependent parameters and the lack of large-scale, machine-readable data to support modeling. While the scientific literature contains many relevant experiments, results are inconsistently reported (often in tables and figures) and use non-uniform units, limiting utilization at scale. To address these limitations, this work presents HUGO-CS, a literature-derived dataset of 4,383 cold-spray experiments with 144 features from 1,124 sources, exceeding the previous largest dataset (137 samples) by 30x. With completely manual extraction requiring an average of 91 minutes per document, this work designs and leverages a Hybrid-labeled, Uncertainty-aware, General-purpose, Observational extraction framework, called HUGO, to support this extraction. HUGO combines automated LLM-based labeling with targeted manual label refinement to handle this experimental result extraction process from scientific literature. To balance labeling efficiency with extraction accuracy, HUGO introduces a Hierarchical Risk Mitigation (HRM) to route LLM outputs with a high risk of potential errors for manual review, while retaining low-risk records as auto-labeled. Lastly, HUGO post-processing consolidates categorical descriptors, maps reported feedstock chemistries into structured continuous compositions, and normalizes units across sources. Of the 4,383 reported experiments, 1,765 are hand-labeled, providing a high-quality labeled subset for benchmarking, error analysis, and higher-fidelity data points. All code to replicate this work, along with the complete HUGO-CS dataset, are released under a CC-BY license at https://github.com/sprice134/HUGO.