# Improved Distribution Matching for Dataset Condensation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09742 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09742/

## Key facts

- Cited by 124 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Dataset Condensation with Gradient Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05929/) (2020)
- [Dataset Distillation by Matching Training Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11932/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [Dataset Condensation with Distribution Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04181/) (2021)
- [Dataset Condensation with Differentiable Siamese Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08259/) (2021)
- [Generative Moment Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02761/) (2015)
- [Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10959/) (2018)
- [Dataset Meta-Learning from Kernel Ridge-Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00050/) (2020)
- [Dataset Distillation with Infinitely Wide Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13034/) (2021)
- [Dataset Condensation via Efficient Synthetic-Data Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14959/) (2022)
- [Dataset Distillation using Neural Feature Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00719/) (2022)
- [Privacy for Free: How does Dataset Condensation Help Privacy?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00240/) (2022)
- [Online Coreset Selection for Rehearsal-based Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01085/) (2021)
- [Distilled One-Shot Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07999/) (2020)
- [Soft-Label Dataset Distillation and Text Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02551/) (2019)
- [Dataset Condensation with Contrastive Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02916/) (2022)
- [Generative Teaching Networks: Accelerating Neural Architecture Search by Learning to Generate Synthetic Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07768/) (2019)
- [Turning Big data into tiny data: Constant-size coresets for k-means, PCA and projective clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04518/) (2018)
- [Flexible Dataset Distillation: Learn Labels Instead of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08572/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 124)

- [Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05773/) (2023)
- [On the Diversity and Realism of Distilled Dataset: An Efficient Dataset Distillation Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03526/) (2023)
- [Efficient Dataset Distillation via Minimax Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15529/) (2023)
- [M3D: Dataset Condensation by Minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15927/) (2023)
- [Dataset Distillation with Neural Characteristic Function: A Minmax Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20653/) (2025)
- [Real-Fake: Effective Training Data Synthesis Through Distribution Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10402/) (2023)
- [Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17612/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Inter-sample and Inter-feature Relations in Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00563/) (2024)
- [Dataset Distillation by Automatic Training Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14245/) (2024)
- [The Evolution of Dataset Distillation: Toward Scalable and Generalizable Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05673/) (2025)
- [DELT: A Simple Diversity-driven EarlyLate Training for Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19946/) (2024)
- [Multisize Dataset Condensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06075/) (2024)
- [Are Large-scale Soft Labels Necessary for Large-scale Dataset Distillation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15919/) (2024)
- [Dataset Distillation via Vision-Language Category Prototype](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23580/) (2025)
- [Emphasizing Discriminative Features for Dataset Distillation in Complex Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17193/) (2024)
- [Taming Diffusion for Dataset Distillation with High Representativeness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18399/) (2025)
- [Low-Rank Similarity Mining for Multimodal Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03793/) (2024)
- [Graph Distillation with Eigenbasis Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09202/) (2023)
- [DANCE: Dual-View Distribution Alignment for Dataset Condensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01063/) (2024)
- [Hyperbolic Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24623/) (2025)
- [CaO2: Rectifying Inconsistencies in Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22637/) (2025)
- [What is Dataset Distillation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04284/) (2024)
- [Generative Dataset Distillation Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08610/) (2024)
- [Teddy: Efficient Large-Scale Dataset Distillation via Taylor-Approximated Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07579/) (2024)
- [Group Distributionally Robust Dataset Distillation with Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04676/) (2024)
- [DD-Ranking: Rethinking the Evaluation of Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13300/) (2025)
- [Information-Guided Diffusion Sampling for Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04619/) (2025)
- [GIFT: Unlocking Full Potential of Labels in Distilled Dataset at Near-zero Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14736/) (2024)
- [Distilling Long-tailed Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14506/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Dataset Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16895/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dataset Condensation aims to condense a large dataset into a smaller one while maintaining its ability to train a well-performing model, thus reducing the storage cost and training effort in deep learning applications. However, conventional dataset condensation methods are optimization-oriented and condense the dataset by performing gradient or parameter matching during model optimization, which is computationally intensive even on small datasets and models. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset condensation method based on distribution matching, which is more efficient and promising. Specifically, we identify two important shortcomings of naive distribution matching (i.e., imbalanced feature numbers and unvalidated embeddings for distance computation) and address them with three novel techniques (i.e., partitioning and expansion augmentation, efficient and enriched model sampling, and class-aware distribution regularization). Our simple yet effective method outperforms most previous optimization-oriented methods with much fewer computational resources, thereby scaling data condensation to larger datasets and models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/uitrbn/IDM
