Few-Shot Dataset Distillation via Translative Pre-Training

Dataset distillation aims at a small synthetic dataset to mimic the training performance on neural networks of a given large dataset. Existing approaches heavily rely on an iterative optimization to update synthetic data and multiple forward-backward passes over thousands of neural network spaces, which introduce significant overhead for computation and are inconvenient in scenarios requiring high efficiency. In this paper, we focus on few-shot dataset distillation, where a distilled dataset is synthesized with only a few or even a single network. To this end, we introduce the notion of distillation space, such that synthetic data optimized only in this specific space can achieve the effect of those optimized through numerous neural networks, with dramatically accelerated training and reduced computational cost. To learn such a distillation space, we first formulate the problem as a quad-level optimization framework and propose a bi-level algorithm. Nevertheless, the algorithm in its original form has a large memory footprint in practice due to the back-propagation through an unrolled computational graph. We then convert the problem of learning the distillation space to a first-order one based on image translation. Specifically, the synthetic images are optimized in an arbitrary but fixed neural space and then translated to those in the targeted distillation space. We pre-train the translator on some large datasets like ImageNet so that it requires only a limited number of adaptation steps on the target dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the translator after pre-training and a limited number of adaptation steps achieves comparable distillation performance with state of the arts, with similar to 15x acceleration. It also exerts satisfactory generalization performance across different datasets, storage budgets, and numbers of classes.