FocusDC: Real-World Scene Infusion for Robust Dataset Condensation

Dataset condensation has emerged as a strategy to compress real-world datasets for efficient training. However, it struggles with large-scale and high-resolution datasets, limiting its practicality. This paper introduces a novel resolution-independent dataset distillation method Focused Dataset Condensation (FocusDC), which achieves diversity and realism in distilled data by identifying key information patches, thereby ensuring the generalization capability of the distilled dataset across different network architectures. Specifically, FocusDC leverages a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract key image patches, which are then synthesized into a single distilled image. These distilled images, which capture multiple targets, are suitable not only for classification tasks but also for dense tasks such as object detection. To further improve the generalization of the distilled dataset, each synthesized image is augmented with a downsampled view of the original image. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that, with 100 images per class (IPC), ResNet50 and MobileNet-v2 achieve validation accuracies of 71.0% and 62.6%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 2.8% and 4.7%. Notably, FocusDC is the first method to use distilled datasets for object detection tasks. On the COCO2017 dataset, with an IPC of 50, YOLOv11n and YOLOv11s achieve 24.4% and 32.1% mAP, respectively, further validating the effectiveness of our approach.