Dataset Condensation with Color Compensation

Dataset condensation always faces a constitutive trade-off: balancing performance and fidelity under extreme compression. Existing methods struggle with two bottlenecks: image-level selection methods (Coreset Selection, Dataset Quantization) suffer from inefficiency condensation, while pixel-level optimization (Dataset Distillation) introduces semantic distortion due to over-parameterization. With empirical observations, we find that a critical problem in dataset condensation is the oversight of color's dual role as an information carrier and a basic semantic representation unit. We argue that improving the colorfulness of condensed images is beneficial for representation learning. Motivated by this, we propose DC3: a Dataset Condensation framework with Color Compensation. After a calibrated selection strategy, DC3 utilizes the latent diffusion model to enhance the color diversity of an image rather than creating a brand-new one. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and generalization of DC3 that outperforms SOTA methods across multiple benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, besides focusing on downstream tasks, DC3 is the first research to fine-tune pre-trained diffusion models with condensed datasets. The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Inception Score (IS) results prove that training networks with our high-quality datasets is feasible without model collapse or other degradation issues. Code and generated data are available at https://github.com/528why/Dataset-Condensation-with-Color-Compensation.