English

Data Distillation: A Survey

Machine Learning 2023-09-27 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Information Retrieval

Abstract

The popularity of deep learning has led to the curation of a vast number of massive and multifarious datasets. Despite having close-to-human performance on individual tasks, training parameter-hungry models on large datasets poses multi-faceted problems such as (a) high model-training time; (b) slow research iteration; and (c) poor eco-sustainability. As an alternative, data distillation approaches aim to synthesize terse data summaries, which can serve as effective drop-in replacements of the original dataset for scenarios like model training, inference, architecture search, etc. In this survey, we present a formal framework for data distillation, along with providing a detailed taxonomy of existing approaches. Additionally, we cover data distillation approaches for different data modalities, namely images, graphs, and user-item interactions (recommender systems), while also identifying current challenges and future research directions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.04272,
  title  = {Data Distillation: A Survey},
  author = {Noveen Sachdeva and Julian McAuley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.04272},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted at TMLR '23. 21 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:08:59.807Z