The true test dataset for a generalised task

The standard ML pipeline is well known: you want to teach a task to an algorithm. Take your data which encodes that task, split it into training, validation, and test sets. Train the ML on the training set, using the validation set to tune hyper-parameters. Then, finally, check that the algorithm has learnt the task by evaluating it on the test set. This will ensure that it hasn’t overfitted to the training data. Particularly important: the test set must come from the same distribution as the tr...