15.8CVAug 22, 2024
Not All Samples Should Be Utilized Equally: Towards Understanding and Improving Dataset DistillationShaobo Wang, Yantai Yang, Qilong Wang et al.
Dataset Distillation (DD) aims to synthesize a small dataset capable of performing comparably to the original dataset. Despite the success of numerous DD methods, theoretical exploration of this area remains unaddressed. In this paper, we take an initial step towards understanding various matching-based DD methods from the perspective of sample difficulty. We begin by empirically examining sample difficulty, measured by gradient norm, and observe that different matching-based methods roughly correspond to specific difficulty tendencies. We then extend the neural scaling laws of data pruning to DD to theoretically explain these matching-based methods. Our findings suggest that prioritizing the synthesis of easier samples from the original dataset can enhance the quality of distilled datasets, especially in low IPC (image-per-class) settings. Based on our empirical observations and theoretical analysis, we introduce the Sample Difficulty Correction (SDC) approach, designed to predominantly generate easier samples to achieve higher dataset quality. Our SDC can be seamlessly integrated into existing methods as a plugin with minimal code adjustments. Experimental results demonstrate that adding SDC generates higher-quality distilled datasets across 7 distillation methods and 6 datasets.
22.6LGNov 10, 2025
Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human DemonstrationsAarash Feizi, Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian et al.
Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.
2.7LGJan 29
Grounding and Enhancing Informativeness and Utility in Dataset DistillationShaobo Wang, Yantai Yang, Guo Chen et al.
Dataset Distillation (DD) seeks to create a compact dataset from a large, real-world dataset. While recent methods often rely on heuristic approaches to balance efficiency and quality, the fundamental relationship between original and synthetic data remains underexplored. This paper revisits knowledge distillation-based dataset distillation within a solid theoretical framework. We introduce the concepts of Informativeness and Utility, capturing crucial information within a sample and essential samples in the training set, respectively. Building on these principles, we define optimal dataset distillation mathematically. We then present InfoUtil, a framework that balances informativeness and utility in synthesizing the distilled dataset. InfoUtil incorporates two key components: (1) game-theoretic informativeness maximization using Shapley Value attribution to extract key information from samples, and (2) principled utility maximization by selecting globally influential samples based on Gradient Norm. These components ensure that the distilled dataset is both informative and utility-optimized. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 6.1\% performance improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approach on ImageNet-1K dataset using ResNet-18.
1.5CVMar 2
Towards Principled Dataset Distillation: A Spectral Distribution PerspectiveRuixi Wu, Shaobo Wang, Jiahuan Chen et al.
Dataset distillation (DD) aims to compress large-scale datasets into compact synthetic counterparts for efficient model training. However, existing DD methods exhibit substantial performance degradation on long-tailed datasets. We identify two fundamental challenges: heuristic design choices for distribution discrepancy measure and uniform treatment of imbalanced classes. To address these limitations, we propose Class-Aware Spectral Distribution Matching (CSDM), which reformulates distribution alignment via the spectrum of a well-behaved kernel function. This technique maps the original samples into frequency space, resulting in the Spectral Distribution Distance (SDD). To mitigate class imbalance, we exploit the unified form of SDD to perform amplitude-phase decomposition, which adaptively prioritizes the realism in tail classes. On CIFAR-10-LT, with 10 images per class, CSDM achieves a 14.0% improvement over state-of-the-art DD methods, with only a 5.7% performance drop when the number of images in tail classes decreases from 500 to 25, demonstrating strong stability on long-tailed data.