# Multimodal Dataset Distillation via Phased Teacher Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25388 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25388/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 65 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (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)
- [Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04742/) (2019)
- [Dataset Condensation with Distribution Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04181/) (2021)
- [High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06171/) (2021)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Step-DPO: Step-wise Preference Optimization for Long-chain Reasoning of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18629/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RPM-Distill: Physiology-guided Adaptive Cross-modal Distillation for Robust Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28089/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal dataset distillation aims to construct compact synthetic datasets that enable efficient compression and knowledge transfer from large-scale image-text data. However, existing approaches often fail to capture the complex, dynamically evolving knowledge embedded in the later training stages of teacher models. This limitation leads to degraded student performance and compromises the quality of the distilled data. To address critical challenges such as pronounced cross-stage performance gaps and unstable teacher trajectories, we propose Phased Teacher Model with Shortcut Trajectory (PTM-ST) -- a novel phased distillation framework. PTM-ST leverages stage-aware teacher modeling and a shortcut-based trajectory construction strategy to accurately fit the teacher's learning dynamics across distinct training phases. This enhances both the stability and expressiveness of the distillation process. Through theoretical analysis and comprehensive experiments, we show that PTM-ST significantly mitigates optimization oscillations and inter-phase knowledge gaps, while also reducing storage overhead. Our method consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on Flickr30k and COCO, achieving up to 13.5% absolute improvement and an average gain of 9.53% on Flickr30k. Code: https://github.com/Previsior/PTM-ST.
