# Breaking Class Barriers: Efficient Dataset Distillation via Inter-Class Feature Compensator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06927 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06927/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (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)
- [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 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)
- [Scaling Up Dataset Distillation to ImageNet-1K with Constant Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10586/) (2022)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [Minimizing the Accumulated Trajectory Error to Improve Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11004/) (2022)
- [Squeeze, Recover and Relabel: Dataset Condensation at ImageNet Scale From A New Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13092/) (2023)
- [Dataset Distillation: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07014/) (2023)
- [Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05773/) (2023)
- [Dataset Distillation via Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16774/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05603/) (2023)
- [Efficient Dataset Distillation Using Random Feature Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12067/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17612/) (2024)
- [The Evolution of Dataset Distillation: Toward Scalable and Generalizable Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05673/) (2025)
- [Efficient Multimodal Dataset Distillation via Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15472/) (2025)
- [Unifying Dataset Pruning and Distillation for Efficient Large-scale Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06434/) (2025)
- [SCORE: Soft Label Compression-Centric Dataset Condensation via Coding Rate Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13935/) (2025)
- [High-Energy Concentration for Federated Learning in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12630/) (2025)
- [DiRe: Diversity-promoting Regularization for Dataset Condensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13083/) (2025)
- [Hard Labels In! Rethinking the Role of Hard Labels in Mitigating Local Semantic Drift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15647/) (2025)
- [Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long: Exploring Dataset Distillation for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20196/) (2026)
- [Condensing Large-Scale Datasets Directly with Minimal Information Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00916/) (2026)
- [Distill Video Datasets into Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14621/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Dataset Distillation Made Simple by Prototype-Guided Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19756/) (2026)
- [Soft Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-Scale Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18135/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dataset distillation has emerged as a technique aiming to condense informative features from large, natural datasets into a compact and synthetic form. While recent advancements have refined this technique, its performance is bottlenecked by the prevailing class-specific synthesis paradigm. Under this paradigm, synthetic data is optimized exclusively for a pre-assigned one-hot label, creating an implicit class barrier in feature condensation. This leads to inefficient utilization of the distillation budget and oversight of inter-class feature distributions, which ultimately limits the effectiveness and efficiency, as demonstrated in our analysis. To overcome these constraints, this paper presents the Inter-class Feature Compensator (INFER), an innovative distillation approach that transcends the class-specific data-label framework widely utilized in current dataset distillation methods. Specifically, INFER leverages a Universal Feature Compensator (UFC) to enhance feature integration across classes, enabling the generation of multiple additional synthetic instances from a single UFC input. This significantly improves the efficiency of the distillation budget. Moreover, INFER enriches inter-class interactions during the distillation, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and generalizability of the distilled data. By allowing for the linear interpolation of labels similar to those in the original dataset, INFER meticulously optimizes the synthetic data and dramatically reduces the size of soft labels in the synthetic dataset to almost zero, establishing a new benchmark for efficiency and effectiveness in dataset distillation. In practice, INFER demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across benchmark datasets. For instance, in the ipc = 50 setting on ImageNet-1k with the same compression level, it outperforms SRe2L by 34.5% using ResNet18.