Leveraging Multi-Modal Information to Enhance Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation aims to create a small and highly representative synthetic dataset that preserves the essential information of a larger real dataset. Beyond reducing storage and computational costs, related approaches offer a promising avenue for privacy preservation in computer vision by eliminating the need to store or share sensitive real-world images. Existing methods focus solely on optimizing visual representations, overlooking the potential of multi-modal information. In this work, we propose a multi-modal dataset distillation framework that incorporates two key enhancements: caption-guided supervision and object-centric masking. To leverage textual information, we introduce two strategies: caption concatenation, which fuses caption embeddings with visual features during classification, and caption matching, which enforces semantic alignment between real and synthetic data through a caption-based loss. To improve data utility and reduce unnecessary background noise, we employ segmentation masks to isolate target objects and introduce two novel losses: masked feature alignment and masked gradient matching, both aimed at promoting object-centric learning. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach improves downstream performance while promoting privacy protection by minimizing exposure to real data.