Dataset Distillation by Matching Training Trajectories

George Cazenavette, Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba, Alexei A. Efros, Jun-Yan Zhu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10718-10727

Dataset distillation is the task of synthesizing a small dataset such that a model trained on the synthetic set will match the test accuracy of the model trained on the full dataset. The task is extremely challenging as it often involves backpropagating through the full training process or assuming the strong constraint that a single training step on distilled data can only imitate a single step on real data. In this paper, we propose a new formulation that optimizes our distilled data to guide networks to a similar state as those trained on real data across many training steps. Given a network, we train it for several iterations on our distilled data and optimize the distilled data with respect to the distance between the synthetically trained parameters and the parameters trained on real data. To efficiently obtain the initial and target network parameters for large-scale datasets, we pre-compute and store training trajectories of expert networks trained on the real dataset. Our method handily outperforms existing methods and also allows us to distill with higher-resolution visual data.