# DeCO: Discriminative Evidence Composition for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25480/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Bilinear CNNs for Fine-grained Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.07889/) (2015)
- [Scaling Up Dataset Distillation to ImageNet-1K with Constant Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10586/) (2022)
- [Squeeze, Recover and Relabel: Dataset Condensation at ImageNet Scale From A New Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13092/) (2023)
- [TransFG: A Transformer Architecture for Fine-grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07976/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08728/) (2021)
- [On the Diversity and Realism of Distilled Dataset: An Efficient Dataset Distillation Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03526/) (2023)
- [Dataset Condensation with Contrastive Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02916/) (2022)
- [DREAM: Efficient Dataset Distillation by Representative Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14416/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Progressive Multi-Granularity Training of Jigsaw Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03836/) (2020)
- [Learning Attentive Pairwise Interaction for Fine-Grained Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10191/) (2020)
- [Efficient Dataset Distillation via Minimax Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15529/) (2023)
- [Synthesizing Informative Training Samples with GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07513/) (2022)
- [D4M: Dataset Distillation via Disentangled Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15138/) (2024)
- [Generalized Large-Scale Data Condensation via Various Backbone and Statistical Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17950/) (2023)
- [Towards Faster Training of Global Covariance Pooling Networks by Iterative Matrix Square Root Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01034/) (2017)
- [Cross-X Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04412/) (2019)
- [See Better Before Looking Closer: Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09891/) (2019)
- [Soft-Label Anonymous Gastric X-ray Image Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02857/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Bilinear Pooling for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09915/) (2018)
- [Channel Interaction Networks for Fine-Grained Image Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05235/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Dataset Condensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13733/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while preserving its downstream utility. However, existing methods primarily preserve global image statistics and may overlook the localized evidence essential for fine-grained visual classification (FGVC), such as object parts, subtle textures, and region-specific structures. We formulate fine-grained dataset distillation as budgeted discriminative-evidence preservation and propose Discriminative Evidence Composition (DeCO). DeCO uses attention rollout from a pretrained TransFG teacher to identify informative patches, applies spatial diversification to reduce redundant coverage, and organizes the resulting regions into class-wise evidence banks. Multiple same-class regions are then packed into compact grid-composed images. The teacher is used only for dataset construction, whereas downstream students are trained with standard hard-label supervision without teacher logits. Experiments on CUB-200-2011, FGVC-Aircraft, and Stanford Cars show that DeCO consistently outperforms representative coreset and dataset-distillation baselines under different IPC budgets.