Efficient AI

Grounding and Enhancing Informativeness and Utility in Dataset Distillation

SShaobo WangYYantai YangGGuo ChenPPeiru LiKKaixin LiYYufa ZhouZZhaorun ChenLLinfeng Zhang
Published
January 29, 2026
Authors
8
Word Count
9,708
Code
Includes code

Efficient, interpretable dataset distillation for ML.

Abstract

Dataset Distillation (DD) seeks to create a compact dataset from a large, real-world dataset. While recent methods often rely on heuristic approaches to balance efficiency and quality, the fundamental relationship between original and synthetic data remains underexplored. This paper revisits knowledge distillation-based dataset distillation within a solid theoretical framework. We introduce the concepts of Informativeness and Utility, capturing crucial information within a sample and essential samples in the training set, respectively. Building on these principles, we define optimal dataset distillation mathematically. We then present InfoUtil, a framework that balances informativeness and utility in synthesizing the distilled dataset. InfoUtil incorporates two key components: (1) game-theoretic informativeness maximization using Shapley Value attribution to extract key information from samples, and (2) principled utility maximization by selecting globally influential samples based on Gradient Norm. These components ensure that the distilled dataset is both informative and utility-optimized. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 6.1\% performance improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approach on ImageNet-1K dataset using ResNet-18.

Key Takeaways

  • 1

    Balances Informativeness and Utility in dataset distillation.

  • 2

    Uses Shapley Value and Gradient Norm for distillation.

  • 3

    Offers a theoretically grounded, interpretable solution.

Limitations

  • Requires computational resources for Shapley Value calculation.

  • May not be applicable to all types of datasets.

Keywords

dataset distillationknowledge distillationinformativenessutilityShapley Value attributionGradient Normgame-theoretic optimization

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