# AST: Effective Dataset Distillation through Alignment with Smooth and High-Quality Expert Trajectories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10541 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10541/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (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)
- [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)
- [Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10536/) (2022)
- [Dataset Condensation via Efficient Synthetic-Data Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14959/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Dataset Distillation to ImageNet-1K with Constant Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10586/) (2022)
- [Dataset Distillation using Neural Feature Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00719/) (2022)
- [Minimizing the Accumulated Trajectory Error to Improve Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11004/) (2022)
- [Dataset Distillation: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07014/) (2023)
- [Generalizing Dataset Distillation via Deep Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01649/) (2023)
- [Dataset Distillation via Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16774/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Flexible Dataset Distillation: Learn Labels Instead of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08572/) (2020)
- [Data Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04272/) (2023)
- [Synthesizing Informative Training Samples with GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07513/) (2022)
- [DC-BENCH: Dataset Condensation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09639/) (2022)
- [Private Set Generation with Discriminative Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04446/) (2022)
- [Diversity Matters When Learning From Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14149/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Label-Augmented Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16239/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training large AI models typically requires large-scale datasets in the machine learning process, making training and parameter-tuning process both time-consuming and costly. Some researchers address this problem by carefully synthesizing a very small number of highly representative and informative samples from real-world datasets. This approach, known as Dataset Distillation (DD), proposes a perspective for data-efficient learning. Despite recent progress in this field, the performance of existing methods still cannot meet expectations, and distilled datasets cannot effectively replace original datasets. In this paper, unlike previous methods that focus solely on improving the effectiveness of student distillation, we recognize and leverage the important mutual influence between expert and student models. We observed that the smoothness of expert trajectories has a significant impact on subsequent student parameter alignment. Based on this, we propose an effective DD framework named AST, standing for Alignment with Smooth and high-quality expert Trajectories. We devise the integration of clipping loss and gradient penalty to regulate the rate of parameter changes in expert trajectory generation. To further refine the student parameter alignment with expert trajectory, we put forward representative initialization for the synthetic dataset and balanced inner-loop loss in response to the sensitivity exhibited towards randomly initialized variables during distillation. We also propose two enhancement strategies, namely intermediate matching loss and weight perturbation, to mitigate the potential occurrence of cumulative errors. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets of different scales, sizes, and resolutions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior methods.