RCAP: Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic Dynamic Dataset Pruning
For practitioners training classification models on balanced or imbalanced datasets, RCAP offers a robust pruning method that maintains high worst-group accuracy at extreme pruning rates, addressing a key limitation of existing dynamic pruning techniques.
RCAP proposes a class-aware probabilistic dynamic pruning algorithm that adaptively selects training subsets per class using a closed-form solution and class-wise loss. It achieves >1% improvement on imbalanced datasets with only 10% data and an average 8.69x speedup, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in worst-group accuracy.
Dynamic data pruning techniques aim to reduce computational cost while minimizing information loss by periodically selecting representative subsets of input data during model training. However, existing methods often struggle to maintain strong worst-group accuracy, particularly at high pruning rates, across balanced and imbalanced datasets. To address this challenge, we propose RCAP, a Robust, Class-Aware, Probabilistic dynamic dataset pruning algorithm for classification tasks. RCAP applies a closed-form solution to estimate the fraction of samples to be included in the training subset for each individual class. This fraction is adaptively adjusted in every epoch using class-wise aggregated loss. Thereafter, it employs an adaptive sampling strategy that prioritizes samples having high loss for populating the class-wise subsets. We evaluate RCAP on six diverse datasets ranging from class-balanced to highly imbalanced using five distinct models across three training paradigms: training from scratch, transfer learning, and fine-tuning. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dataset pruning methods, achieving superior worst-group accuracy at all pruning rates. Remarkably, with only $10\%$ data, RCAP delivers $>1\%$ improvement in performance on class-imbalanced datasets compared to full data training while providing an average $8.69\times$ speedup. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/atif-hassan/RCAP-dynamic-dataset-pruning