# REDUCR: Robust Data Downsampling Using Class Priority Reweighting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00486/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10350/) (2021)
- [Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14486/) (2022)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [Dataset Distillation by Matching Training Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11932/) (2022)
- [BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08158/) (2019)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [Selection via Proxy: Efficient Data Selection for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11829/) (2019)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10169/) (2023)
- [Prioritized Training on Points that are Learnable, Worth Learning, and Not Yet Learnt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07137/) (2022)
- [Dataset Distillation with Infinitely Wide Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13034/) (2021)
- [Coresets via Bilevel Optimization for Continual Learning and Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03875/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02060/) (2019)
- [Online Batch Selection for Faster Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06343/) (2015)
- [Plex: Towards Reliability using Pretrained Large Model Extensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07411/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Group Robust Preference Optimization in Reward-free RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20304/) (2024)
- [Not All Rollouts are Useful: Down-Sampling Rollouts in LLM Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13818/) (2025)
- [Securing Transfer-Learned Networks with Reverse Homomorphic Encryption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14323/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern machine learning models are becoming increasingly expensive to train for real-world image and text classification tasks, where massive web-scale data is collected in a streaming fashion. To reduce the training cost, online batch selection techniques have been developed to choose the most informative datapoints. However, these techniques can suffer from poor worst-class generalization performance due to class imbalance and distributional shifts. This work introduces REDUCR, a robust and efficient data downsampling method that uses class priority reweighting. REDUCR reduces the training data while preserving worst-class generalization performance. REDUCR assigns priority weights to datapoints in a class-aware manner using an online learning algorithm. We demonstrate the data efficiency and robust performance of REDUCR on vision and text classification tasks. On web-scraped datasets with imbalanced class distributions, REDUCR significantly improves worst-class test accuracy (and average accuracy), surpassing state-of-the-art methods by around 15%.
