Rethinking Long-tailed Dataset Distillation: A Uni-Level Framework with Unbiased Recovery and Relabeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cui, Xiao, Qin, Yulei, Li, Xinyue, Zhou, Wengang, Li, Hongsheng, Li, Houqiang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Cui, Xiao
Qin, Yulei
Li, Xinyue
Zhou, Wengang
Li, Hongsheng
Li, Houqiang
author_facet Cui, Xiao
Qin, Yulei
Li, Xinyue
Zhou, Wengang
Li, Hongsheng
Li, Houqiang
contents Dataset distillation creates a small distilled set that enables efficient training by capturing key information from the full dataset. While existing dataset distillation methods perform well on balanced datasets, they struggle under long-tailed distributions, where imbalanced class frequencies induce biased model representations and corrupt statistical estimates such as Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. In this paper, we rethink long-tailed dataset distillation by revisiting the limitations of trajectory-based methods, and instead adopt the statistical alignment perspective to jointly mitigate model bias and restore fair supervision. To this end, we introduce three dedicated components that enable unbiased recovery of distilled images and soft relabeling: (1) enhancing expert models (an observer model for recovery and a teacher model for relabeling) to enable reliable statistics estimation and soft-label generation; (2) recalibrating BN statistics via a full forward pass with dynamically adjusted momentum to reduce representation skew; (3) initializing synthetic images by incrementally selecting high-confidence and diverse augmentations via a multi-round mechanism that promotes coverage and diversity. Extensive experiments on four long-tailed benchmarks show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods across varying degrees of class imbalance. Notably, our approach improves top-1 accuracy by 15.6% on CIFAR-100-LT and 11.8% on Tiny-ImageNet-LT under IPC=10 and IF=10. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/RLDD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18858
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Long-tailed Dataset Distillation: A Uni-Level Framework with Unbiased Recovery and Relabeling
Cui, Xiao
Qin, Yulei
Li, Xinyue
Zhou, Wengang
Li, Hongsheng
Li, Houqiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Dataset distillation creates a small distilled set that enables efficient training by capturing key information from the full dataset. While existing dataset distillation methods perform well on balanced datasets, they struggle under long-tailed distributions, where imbalanced class frequencies induce biased model representations and corrupt statistical estimates such as Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. In this paper, we rethink long-tailed dataset distillation by revisiting the limitations of trajectory-based methods, and instead adopt the statistical alignment perspective to jointly mitigate model bias and restore fair supervision. To this end, we introduce three dedicated components that enable unbiased recovery of distilled images and soft relabeling: (1) enhancing expert models (an observer model for recovery and a teacher model for relabeling) to enable reliable statistics estimation and soft-label generation; (2) recalibrating BN statistics via a full forward pass with dynamically adjusted momentum to reduce representation skew; (3) initializing synthetic images by incrementally selecting high-confidence and diverse augmentations via a multi-round mechanism that promotes coverage and diversity. Extensive experiments on four long-tailed benchmarks show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods across varying degrees of class imbalance. Notably, our approach improves top-1 accuracy by 15.6% on CIFAR-100-LT and 11.8% on Tiny-ImageNet-LT under IPC=10 and IF=10. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/RLDD.
title Rethinking Long-tailed Dataset Distillation: A Uni-Level Framework with Unbiased Recovery and Relabeling
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18858