Mind Your Margin and Boundary: Are Your Distilled Datasets Truly Robust?

Dataset distillation (DD) compresses a large training set into a small synthetic set, reducing storage and training cost, and has shown strong results on general benchmarks. Decoupled DD further improves efficiency by splitting the pipeline into pretraining, sample distillation, and soft-label generation. However, existing decoupled methods largely rely on coarse class-label supervision and optimize samples within each class in a nearly identical manner. On fine-grained datasets, this often yields distilled samples that (i) retain large intra-class variation with subtle inter-class differences and (ii) become overly similar within the same class, limiting localized discriminative cues and hurting recognition. To solve the above-mentioned problems, we propose FD$^{2}$, a dedicated framework for Fine-grained Dataset Distillation. FD$^{2}$ localizes discriminative regions and constructs fine-grained representations for distillation. During pretraining, counterfactual attention learning aggregates discriminative representations to update class prototypes. During distillation, a fine-grained characteristic constraint aligns each sample with its class prototype while repelling others, and a similarity constraint diversifies attention across same-class samples. Experiments on multiple fine-grained and general datasets show that FD$^{2}$ integrates seamlessly with decoupled DD and improves performance in most settings, indicating strong transferability. Code is available at https://github.com/Guang000/FD2.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in classical machine learning problems. However, they are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Countermeasures proposed in the literature, notably Information Bottleneck Distillation (IBD) introduced by Kuang et al., degrade the classification accuracy on clean inputs while improving the robustness to adversarial inputs. In this work, we extend the IBD framework by introducing an extra teacher model (clean teacher) trained with only clean inputs, into the distillation process from a robust teacher model trained by adversarial training. The features of both clean and robust teachers are transferred to the student through a cross-layer attention matrix. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets show that the proposed method improves classification accuracy on clean samples compared to the original IBD, while maintaining similar accuracy on adversarial samples. Furthermore, our methods are competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, including the recent dual-teacher distillation framework B-MTARD, particularly in terms of the harmonic mean between clean and robust accuracy. We also analyze the impact of different training settings that have different influences on the attention module.

Dataset distillation (DD) condenses large corpora into compact, information-rich subsets for efficient training and reuse. However, under noisy supervision, DD risks condensing corrupted associations together with useful signals, degrading robustness. Conventional noisy-label remedies (sample selection, loss weighting, label correction) tightly couple noise estimation with model optimization, often require clean anchors, and can amplify confirmation bias-assumptions that are misaligned with DD's goal of compact, plug-and-play supervision. We therefore propose a trajectory-based DD framework that jointly suppresses noise and preserves transferable knowledge without relabeling or clean subsets. It comprises two complementary components: Selective Guidance Reweighting (SGR), which fuses global forgetting patterns (second-split forgetting) with local neighborhood consistency into a progressive reweighting scheme that prioritizes clean supervision along the teacher trajectory; and Teacher-Inspired Auxiliary Targets (TIAT), which inject auxiliary residual guidance distilled from intermediate teacher dynamics to reinforce informative signals while remaining internally consistent. Together, SGR and TIAT produce distilled datasets with cleaner and richer representations under noisy supervision. The framework is robust, label-preserving, computationally lightweight, and broadly applicable, yielding consistent gains over state-of-the-art DD baselines across symmetric, asymmetric, and real-world noise.