Xulin Gu

Xinhao Zhong, Shuoyang Sun, Xulin Gu et al.

Dataset distillation provides an effective approach to reduce memory and computational costs by optimizing a compact dataset that achieves performance comparable to the full original. However, for large-scale datasets and complex deep networks (e.g., ImageNet-1K with ResNet-101), the vast optimization space hinders distillation effectiveness, limiting practical applications. Recent methods leverage pre-trained diffusion models to directly generate informative images, thereby bypassing pixel-level optimization and achieving promising results. Nonetheless, these approaches often suffer from distribution shifts between the pre-trained diffusion prior and target datasets, as well as the need for multiple distillation steps under varying settings. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework that is orthogonal to existing diffusion-based distillation techniques by utilizing the diffusion prior for patch selection rather than generation. Our method predicts noise from the diffusion model conditioned on input images and optional text prompts (with or without label information), and computes the associated loss for each image-patch pair. Based on the loss differences, we identify distinctive regions within the original images. Furthermore, we apply intra-class clustering and ranking on the selected patches to enforce diversity constraints. This streamlined pipeline enables a one-step distillation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various metrics and settings.

Xinhao Zhong, Bin Chen, Hao Fang et al.

Dataset distillation (DD) aims to minimize the time and memory consumption needed for training deep neural networks on large datasets, by creating a smaller synthetic dataset that has similar performance to that of the full real dataset. However, current dataset distillation methods often result in synthetic datasets that are excessively difficult for networks to learn from, due to the compression of a substantial amount of information from the original data through metrics measuring feature similarity, e,g., distribution matching (DM). In this work, we introduce conditional mutual information (CMI) to assess the class-aware complexity of a dataset and propose a novel method by minimizing CMI. Specifically, we minimize the distillation loss while constraining the class-aware complexity of the synthetic dataset by minimizing its empirical CMI from the feature space of pre-trained networks, simultaneously. Conducting on a thorough set of experiments, we show that our method can serve as a general regularization method to existing DD methods and improve the performance and training efficiency.

Xulin Gu, Xinhao Zhong, Zhixing Wei et al.

Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for dataset compression, enabling the synthesis of compact surrogate datasets that approximate the training utility of large-scale ones. While significant progress has been achieved in distilling image datasets, extending DD to the video domain remains challenging due to the high dimensionality and temporal complexity inherent in video data. Existing video distillation (VD) methods often suffer from excessive computational costs and struggle to preserve temporal dynamics, as naïve extensions of image-based approaches typically lead to degraded performance. In this paper, we propose a novel uni-level video dataset distillation framework that directly optimizes synthetic videos with respect to a pre-trained model. To address temporal redundancy and enhance motion preservation, we introduce a temporal saliency-guided filtering mechanism that leverages inter-frame differences to guide the distillation process, encouraging the retention of informative temporal cues while suppressing frame-level redundancy. Extensive experiments on standard video benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, bridging the gap between real and distilled video data and offering a scalable solution for video dataset compression.

Xinhao Zhong, Shuoyang Sun, Xulin Gu et al.

Dataset distillation aims to generate compact synthetic datasets that enable models trained on them to achieve performance comparable to those trained on full real datasets, while substantially reducing storage and computational costs. Early bi-level optimization methods (e.g., MTT) have shown promising results on small-scale datasets, but their scalability is limited by high computational overhead. To address this limitation, recent decoupled dataset distillation methods (e.g., SRe$^2$L) separate the teacher model pre-training from the synthetic data generation process. These methods also introduce random data augmentation and epoch-wise soft labels during the post-evaluation phase to improve performance and generalization. However, existing decoupled distillation methods suffer from inconsistent post-evaluation protocols, which hinders progress in the field. In this work, we propose Rectified Decoupled Dataset Distillation (RD$^3$), and systematically investigate how different post-evaluation settings affect test accuracy. We further examine whether the reported performance differences across existing methods reflect true methodological advances or stem from discrepancies in evaluation procedures. Our analysis reveals that much of the performance variation can be attributed to inconsistent evaluation rather than differences in the intrinsic quality of the synthetic data. In addition, we identify general strategies that improve the effectiveness of distilled datasets across settings. By establishing a standardized benchmark and rigorous evaluation protocol, RD$^3$ provides a foundation for fair and reproducible comparisons in future dataset distillation research.

Xinhao Zhong, Hao Fang, Bin Chen et al.

Dataset distillation is an emerging dataset reduction method, which condenses large-scale datasets while maintaining task accuracy. Current parameterization methods achieve enhanced performance under extremely high compression ratio by optimizing determined synthetic dataset in informative feature domain. However, they limit themselves to a fixed optimization space for distillation, neglecting the diverse guidance across different informative latent spaces. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel parameterization method dubbed Hierarchical Parameterization Distillation (H-PD), to systematically explore hierarchical feature within provided feature space (e.g., layers within pre-trained generative adversarial networks). We verify the correctness of our insights by applying the hierarchical optimization strategy on GAN-based parameterization method. In addition, we introduce a novel class-relevant feature distance metric to alleviate the computational burden associated with synthetic dataset evaluation, bridging the gap between synthetic and original datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed H-PD achieves a significant performance improvement under various settings with equivalent time consumption, and even surpasses current generative distillation using diffusion models under extreme compression ratios IPC=1 and IPC=10.