Exploring the Impact of Dataset Bias on Dataset Distillation

Dataset Distillation (DD) is a promising technique to synthesize a smaller dataset that preserves essential information from the original dataset. This synthetic dataset can serve as a substitute for the original large-scale one, and help alleviate the training workload. However, current DD methods typically operate under the assumption that the dataset is unbiased, overlooking potential bias issues within the dataset itself. To fill in this blank, we systematically investigate the influence of dataset bias on DD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploration in the DD domain. Given that there are no suitable biased datasets for DD, we first construct two biased datasets, CMNIST-DD and CCIFAR10-DD, to establish a foundation for subsequent analysis. Then we utilize existing DD methods to generate synthetic datasets on CMNIST-DD and CCIFAR10-DD, and evaluate their performance following the standard process. Experiments demonstrate that biases present in the original dataset significantly impact the performance of the synthetic dataset in most cases, which highlights the necessity of identifying and mitigating biases in the original datasets during DD. Finally, we reformulate DD within the context of a biased dataset. Our code along with biased datasets are available at https://github.com/yaolu-zjut/Biased-DD.

Can pre-trained models assist in dataset distillation?

Dataset Distillation (DD) is a prominent technique that encapsulates knowledge from a large-scale original dataset into a small synthetic dataset for efficient training. Meanwhile, Pre-trained Models (PTMs) function as knowledge repositories, containing extensive information from the original dataset. This naturally raises a question: Can PTMs effectively transfer knowledge to synthetic datasets, guiding DD accurately? To this end, we conduct preliminary experiments, confirming the contribution of PTMs to DD. Afterwards, we systematically study different options in PTMs, including initialization parameters, model architecture, training epoch and domain knowledge, revealing that: 1) Increasing model diversity enhances the performance of synthetic datasets; 2) Sub-optimal models can also assist in DD and outperform well-trained ones in certain cases; 3) Domain-specific PTMs are not mandatory for DD, but a reasonable domain match is crucial. Finally, by selecting optimal options, we significantly improve the cross-architecture generalization over baseline DD methods. We hope our work will facilitate researchers to develop better DD techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/yaolu-zjut/DDInterpreter.