Exploring the Impact of Dataset Bias on Dataset Distillation
Yao Lu Jianyang Gu Xuguang Chen Saeed Vahidian Qi Xuan
Dataset Distillation (DD) is a promising technique to synthesize a smaller
dataset that preserves essential information from the original dataset. This
synthetic dataset can serve as a substitute for the original large-scale one,
and help alleviate the training workload. However, current DD methods typically
operate under the assumption that the dataset is unbiased, overlooking
potential bias issues within the dataset itself. To fill in this blank, we
systematically investigate the influence of dataset bias on DD. To the best of
our knowledge, this is the first exploration in the DD domain. Given that there
are no suitable biased datasets for DD, we first construct two biased datasets,
CMNIST-DD and CCIFAR10-DD, to establish a foundation for subsequent analysis.
Then we utilize existing DD methods to generate synthetic datasets on CMNIST-DD
and CCIFAR10-DD, and evaluate their performance following the standard process.
Experiments demonstrate that biases present in the original dataset
significantly impact the performance of the synthetic dataset in most cases,
which highlights the necessity of identifying and mitigating biases in the
original datasets during DD. Finally, we reformulate DD within the context of a
biased dataset. Our code along with biased datasets are available at
https://github.com/yaolu-zjut/Biased-DD.