Dataset Condensation via Expert Subspace Projection

The rapid growth in dataset sizes in modern deep learning has significantly increased data storage costs. Furthermore, the training and time costs for deep neural networks are generally proportional to the dataset size. Therefore, reducing the dataset size while maintaining model performance is an urgent research problem that needs to be addressed. Dataset condensation is a technique that aims to distill the original dataset into a much smaller synthetic dataset while maintaining downstream training performance on any agnostic neural network. Previous work has demonstrated that matching the training trajectory between the synthetic dataset and the original dataset is more effective than matching the instantaneous gradient, as it incorporates long-range information. Despite the effectiveness of trajectory matching, it suffers from complex gradient unrolling across iterations, which leads to significant memory and computation overhead. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach called Expert Subspace Projection (ESP), which leverages long-range information while avoiding gradient unrolling. Instead of strictly enforcing the synthetic dataset’s training trajectory to mimic that of the real dataset, ESP only constrains it to lie within the subspace spanned by the training trajectory of the real dataset. The memory-saving advantage offered by our method facilitates unbiased training on the complete set of synthetic images and seamless integration with other dataset condensation techniques. Through extensive experiments, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our method outperforms the trajectory matching method on CIFAR10 by 16.7% in the setting of 1 Image/Class, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by 3.2%.