Hierarchical Features Matter: A Deep Exploration of GAN Priors for Improved Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation is an emerging dataset reduction method, which condenses large-scale datasets while maintaining task accuracy. Current methods have integrated parameterization techniques to boost synthetic dataset performance by shifting the optimization space from pixel to another 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 Generative Latent Distillation (H-GLaD), to systematically explore hierarchical layers within the generative adversarial networks (GANs). This allows us to progressively span from the initial latent space to the final pixel space. 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-GLaD achieves a significant improvement in both same-architecture and cross-architecture performance with equivalent time consumption.