cs.LGFeb 26, 2026

A Dataset is Worth 1 MB

Authors: Elad Kimchi Shoshani, Leeyam Gabay, Yedid Hoshen

Organizations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Abstract

A dataset server must often distribute the same large payload to many clients, incurring massive communication costs. Since clients frequently operate on diverse hardware and software frameworks, transmitting a pre-trained model is often infeasible; instead, agents require raw data to train their own task-specific models locally. While dataset distillation attempts to compress training signals, current methods struggle to scale to high-resolution data and rarely achieve sufficiently small files. In this paper, we propose Pseudo-Labels as Data (PLADA), a method that completely eliminates pixel transmission. We assume agents are preloaded with a large, generic, unlabeled reference dataset (e.g., ImageNet-1K, ImageNet-21K) and communicate a new task by transmitting only the class labels for specific images. To address the distribution mismatch between the reference and target datasets, we introduce a pruning mechanism that filters the reference dataset to retain only the labels of the most semantically relevant images for the target task. This selection process simultaneously maximizes training efficiency and minimizes transmission payload. Experiments on 10 diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach can transfer task knowledge with a payload of less than 1 MB while retaining high classification accuracy, offering a promising solution for efficient dataset serving.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables16 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Apr 20, 2026

Soft Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-Scale Dataset Distillation

Large-scale dataset distillation requires storing auxiliary soft labels that can be 30-40x larger on ImageNet-1K and 200x larger on ImageNet-21K than the condensed images, undermining the goal of dataset compression. We identify two fundamental issues necessitating such extensive labels: (1) insufficient image diversity, where high within-class similarity in synthetic images requires extensive augmentation, and (2) insufficient supervision diversity, where limited variety in supervisory signals during training leads to performance degradation at high compression rates. To address these challenges, we propose Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-scale Distillation (LPQLD). We enhance image diversity via class-wise batching and batch-normalization supervision during synthesis. For supervision diversity, we introduce Label Pruning with Dynamic Knowledge Reuse to improve label-per-augmentation diversity, and Label Quantization with Calibrated Student-Teacher Alignment to improve augmentation-per-image diversity. Our approach reduces soft label storage by 78x on ImageNet-1K and 500x on ImageNet-21K while improving accuracy by up to 7.2% and 2.8%, respectively. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of LPQLD across different network architectures and dataset distillation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/he-y/soft-label-pruning-quantization-for-dataset-distillation.
Jul 1, 2026

Condensing Large-Scale Datasets Directly with Minimal Information Loss

Recent advancements in scaling dataset distillation rely heavily on decoupled information extraction pipelines, comprising SQUEEZE, RECOVER, and RELABEL stages. Despite their scalability to large-scale datasets, these methods suffer from prohibitive computational overhead and poor cross-architecture generalization. In this paper, we reveal the root cause of these bottlenecks: the implicit dual-compression process, from data to model and back to images, inherently induces severe information loss. Crucially, we empirically and theoretically demonstrate that this loss creates a distribution shift that fundamentally compromises the widely adopted RELABEL strategy, transforming the pre-trained model into an unreliable labeler that yields sub-optimal labels. To overcome these critical flaws, we propose CIM, a novel, metric-driven framework that abandons the flawed dual-compression paradigm. Instead, CIM explicitly quantifies and minimizes the information gap between the original and synthetic datasets. By directly aligning the data distributions, our approach ensures high-fidelity information condensation and inherently satisfies the prerequisites for effective relabeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIM establishes a new state-of-the-art. Notably, it distills ImageNet-1K at an IPC=10 in merely 80 minutes on a single RTX-4090 GPU, achieving an unprecedented 48.7% Top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 and significantly outperforming previous SOTA approaches, such as NRR-DD and DELT, by 2.6% and 2.9%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/CIM.
Feb 17, 2026

Accelerating Large-Scale Dataset Distillation via Exploration-Exploitation Optimization

Dataset distillation compresses the original data into compact synthetic datasets, reducing training time and storage while retaining model performance, enabling deployment under limited resources. Although recent decoupling-based distillation methods enable dataset distillation at large scale, they continue to face an efficiency gap: optimization-based decoupling methods achieve higher accuracy but demand intensive computation, whereas optimization-free decoupling methods are efficient but sacrifice accuracy. To overcome this trade-off, we propose Exploration--Exploitation Distillation (E2^2D), a simple, practical method that minimizes redundant computation through an efficient pipeline that begins with full-image initialization to preserve semantic integrity and feature diversity. It then uses a two-phase optimization strategy: an exploration phase that performs uniform updates and identifies high-loss regions, and an exploitation phase that focuses updates on these regions to accelerate convergence. We evaluate E2^2D on large-scale benchmarks, surpassing the state-of-the-art on ImageNet-1K while being 18×18\times faster, and on ImageNet-21K, our method substantially improves accuracy while remaining 4.3×4.3\times faster. These results demonstrate that targeted, redundancy-reducing updates, rather than brute-force optimization, bridge the gap between accuracy and efficiency in large-scale dataset distillation. Code is available at https://github.com/ncsu-dk-lab/E2D.