# Difficulty-guided Sampling: Bridging the Target Gap between Dataset Distillation and Downstream Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10090 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10090/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Horovod: fast and easy distributed deep learning in TensorFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05799/) (2018)
- [Dataset Condensation via Efficient Synthetic-Data Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14959/) (2022)
- [On the Diversity and Realism of Distilled Dataset: An Efficient Dataset Distillation Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03526/) (2023)
- [D4M: Dataset Distillation via Disentangled Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15138/) (2024)
- [An Overview of Diffusion Models: Applications, Guided Generation, Statistical Rates and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07771/) (2024)
- [Soft-Label Anonymous Gastric X-ray Image Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02857/) (2021)
- [Compressed Gastric Image Generation Based on Soft-Label Dataset Distillation for Medical Data Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14635/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Dataset Distillation: Approaches, Applications and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01975/) (2023)
- [Dataset Distillation via the Wasserstein Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18531/) (2023)
- [The Evolution of Dataset Distillation: Toward Scalable and Generalizable Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05673/) (2025)
- [Dataset Distillation for Medical Dataset Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14603/) (2022)
- [Towards Stable and Storage-efficient Dataset Distillation: Matching Convexified Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19827/) (2024)
- [Importance-Aware Adaptive Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15863/) (2024)
- [Generative Dataset Distillation: Balancing Global Structure and Local Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17732/) (2024)
- [Emphasizing Discriminative Features for Dataset Distillation in Complex Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17193/) (2024)
- [Hyperbolic Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24623/) (2025)
- [Towards Trustworthy Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09165/) (2023)
- [CaO2: Rectifying Inconsistencies in Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22637/) (2025)
- [Generative Dataset Distillation Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08610/) (2024)
- [TD3: Tucker Decomposition Based Dataset Distillation Method for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02854/) (2025)
- [Diversity-Driven Generative Dataset Distillation Based on Diffusion Model with Self-Adaptive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19469/) (2025)
- [Information-Guided Diffusion Sampling for Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04619/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Audio-Visual Dataset Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17890/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose difficulty-guided sampling (DGS) to bridge the target gap between the distillation objective and the downstream task, therefore improving the performance of dataset distillation. Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performance but have time and storage-consuming training processes. Dataset distillation is proposed to generate compact, high-quality distilled datasets, enabling effective model training while maintaining downstream performance. Existing approaches typically focus on features extracted from the original dataset, overlooking task-specific information, which leads to a target gap between the distillation objective and the downstream task. We propose leveraging characteristics that benefit the downstream training into data distillation to bridge this gap. Focusing on the downstream task of image classification, we introduce the concept of difficulty and propose DGS as a plug-in post-stage sampling module. Following the specific target difficulty distribution, the final distilled dataset is sampled from image pools generated by existing methods. We also propose difficulty-aware guidance (DAG) to explore the effect of difficulty in the generation process. Extensive experiments across multiple settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. It also highlights the broader potential of difficulty for diverse downstream tasks.