Exploring the Impact of Dataset Bias on Dataset Distillation

Yao Lu, Jianyang Gu, Xuguang Chen, Saeed Vahidian, Qi Xuan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 7656-7663

Dataset Distillation (DD) is a promising technique to synthesize a smaller dataset that preserves essential information from the original dataset. This synthetic dataset can serve as a substitute for the original large-scale one and help alleviate the training workload. However current DD methods typically operate under the assumption that the dataset is unbiased overlooking potential bias issues within the dataset itself. To fill in this blank we systematically investigate the influence of dataset bias on DD. Given that there are no suitable biased datasets for DD we first construct two biased datasets CMNIST-DD and CCIFAR10-DD to establish a foundation for subsequent analysis. Then we utilize existing DD methods to generate synthetic datasets on CMNIST-DD and CCIFAR10-DD and evaluate their performance following the standard process. Experiments demonstrate that biases present in the original dataset significantly impact the performance of the synthetic dataset in most cases which highlights the necessity of identifying and mitigating biases in the original datasets during DD. Finally we reformulate DD within the context of a biased dataset. Our code along with biased datasets are available at https://github.com/yaolu-zjut/Biased-DD.