ML in a Box: Analyzing Containerization Practices in Open Source ML Projects

Jul 14, 2026

A large-scale empirical study of 1,993 ML-related Dockerfiles finds that containers average 10.27 GB in size and take about 8.84 minutes to build. The research shows that 44.4% of commits trigger rebuilds, with 71% of rebuild work wasted on redundant computation, and identifies 7 recurring ML-specific Dockerfile refactoring patterns to improve efficiency.

Why it matters: This is the first comprehensive analysis of containerization in ML projects, revealing inefficiencies and offering actionable refactoring patterns to optimize build processes.

Full story at: arXiv Software Engineering ↗