数据集调试

Long-term behavioral monitoring of individual animals is crucial for studying behavioral changes that occurs over different time scales, especially for conservation and evolutionary biology. Computer vision methods have proven to benefit biodiversity monitoring, but automated behavior monitoring in wild populations remains challenging. This stems from the lack of datasets that cover a range of computer vision tasks necessary to extract biologically meaningful measurements of individual animals. Here, we introduce such a dataset (CHIRP) with a new method (CORVID) for individual re-identification of wild birds. The CHIRP (Combining beHaviour, Individual Re-identification and Postures) dataset is curated from a long-term population of wild Siberian jays studied in Swedish Lapland, supporting re-identification (re-id), action recognition, 2D keypoint estimation, object detection, and instance segmentation. In addition to traditional task-specific benchmarking, we introduce application-specific benchmarking with biologically relevant metrics (feeding rates, co-occurrence rates) to evaluate the performance of models in real-world use cases. Finally, we present CORVID COlouR-based Video reID), a novel pipeline for individual identification of birds based on the segmentation and classification of colored leg rings, a widespread approach for visual identification of individual birds. CORVID offers a probability-based id tracking method by matching the detected combination of color rings with a database. We use application-specific benchmarking to show that CORVID outperforms state of the art re-id methods. We hope this work offers the community a blueprint for curating real-world datasets from ethically approved biological studies to bridge the gap between computer vision research and biological applications.

Despite the perceived success of large-scale dataset distillation (DD) methods, recent evidence [??] finds that simple random image baselines perform on-par with state-of-the-art DD methods like SRe2L [??] due to the use of soft labels during downstream model training. This is in contrast with the findings in coreset literature, where high-quality coresets consistently outperform random subsets in the hard-label (HL) setting. To understand this discrepancy, we perform a detailed scalability analysis to examine the role of data quality under different label regimes, ranging from abundant soft labels (termed as SL+KD regime) to fixed soft labels (SL) and hard labels (HL). Our analysis reveals that high-quality coresets fail to convincingly outperform the random baseline in both SL and SL+KD regimes. In the SL+KD setting, performance further approaches near-optimal levels relative to the full dataset, regardless of subset size or quality, for a given compute budget. This performance saturation calls into question the widespread practice of using soft labels for model evaluation, where unlike the HL setting, subset quality has negligible influence. A subsequent systematic evaluation of five large-scale and four small-scale DD methods in the HL setting reveals that only RDED [??] reliably outperforms random baselines on ImageNet-1K, but can still lag behind strong coreset methods due to its over-reliance on easy sample patches. Based on this, we introduce CAD-Prune, a compute-aware pruning metric that efficiently identifies samples of optimal difficulty for a given compute budget, and use it to develop CA2D, a compute-aligned DD method, outperforming current DD methods on ImageNet-1K at various IPC settings. Together, our findings uncover many insights into current DD research and establish useful tools to advance data-efficient learning for both coresets and DD.

Dataset distillation enables efficient training by distilling the information of large-scale datasets into significantly smaller synthetic datasets. Diffusion based paradigms have emerged in recent years, offering novel perspectives for dataset distillation. However, they typically necessitate additional fine-tuning stages, and effective guidance mechanisms remain underexplored. To address these limitations, we rethink diffusion based dataset distillation and propose a Dual Matching Guided Diffusion (DMGD) framework, centered on efficient training-free guidance. We first establish Semantic Matching via conditional likelihood optimization, eliminating the need for auxiliary classifiers. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic guidance mechanism that enhances the diversity of synthetic data while maintaining semantic alignment. Simultaneously, we introduce an optimal transport (OT) based Distribution Matching approach to further align with the target distribution structure. To ensure efficiency, we develop two enhanced strategies for diffusion based framework: Distribution Approximate Matching and Greedy Progressive Matching. These strategies enable effective distribution matching guidance with minimal computational overhead. Experimental results on ImageNet-Woof, ImageNet-Nette, and ImageNet-1K demonstrate that our training-free approach achieves significant improvements, outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods requiring additional fine-tuning by average accuracy gains of 2.1%, 5.4%, and 2.4%, respectively.

Condensing the large-scale, high-resolution ImageNet-1K dataset remains a challenge for dataset distillation (DD). Existing methods typically match batch normalization (BN) statistics, i.e., mean and variance, between real and synthetic datasets. Although effective with soft labels, their performance degrades substantially under hard labels. In this paper, we theoretically identify that BN matching mainly aligns the scales of real and synthetic gradients but overlooks their directions. However, experimental evidence demonstrates that gradient direction, rather than scale, is pivotal to model training, clarifying the limitations of prior methods. Building on this insight, we introduce Orthogonal Gradient Matching (OGM), which explicitly aligns the intrinsic direction of gradients, i.e., singular vectors. Specifically, OGM first orthogonalizes real and synthetic gradients by setting all singular values to one, eliminating their scales, and then minimizes the distance between these orthogonal gradients so that their singular vectors coincide. To further reduce computation, OGM employs a least-squares loss whose gradients can be obtained in the forward pass, avoiding back-propagation. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K validate the effectiveness of OGM. With only ten images per class (IPC = 10), OGM achieves 47.0% accuracy with soft labels and 16.7% with hard labels, outperforming training-based DD methods and RDED.

We revisit dataset distillation from an outcome-centric perspective. Rather than aligning process surrogates (per-step gradients or training trajectories), Influence Matching (Inf-Match) aligns the final outcome of training: it learns a compact synthetic set whose effect on the converged parameters matches that of the full dataset. Concretely, we introduce a fully differentiable, sample-level influence estimator that quantifies parameter shifts from adding or removing data, without time-consuming inverse-Hessian products or convexity assumptions. The estimator runs in linear time by unrolling the optimization dynamics and applying a first-order Taylor approximation. We then learn the synthetic set by minimizing the mismatch between its influence and that of the real dataset, yielding outcome alignment rather than heuristic process imitation. Inf-Match delivers the best accuracy across standard classification benchmarks. For instance, on Tiny-ImageNet (IPC=10), Inf-Match attains 31.5%, a +4.7% improvement over NCFM. Beyond classification, Inf-Match scales to vision-language distillation on Flickr30K, outperforming strong process-matching baselines. For instance, with 200 to 1000 synthetic samples, our method achieved a leading impressive average on image/text retrieval tasks, higher than NCFM by 2.5%. The code will be released via https://github.com/hrtan/infmatch.

Dataset Distillation (DD) seeks to create small, synthetic datasets for efficient model training. While diffusion models are powerful generators, their use in DD is hampered by distribution shifts between synthetic and ideal distilled data, leading to suboptimal performance. We identify two critical shifts. First, considering the small capacity of the synthetic data, an optimal synthetic distribution for DD should be a simplification of the real data distribution, rather than replicating the original data's complexity. Second, there is a hazardous empirical deviation in the synthetic dataset from this learned distribution due to the data sampling process. To address these, we introduce a two-stage approach. During diffusion training time, we mitigate the distribution shift by employing an L1 sparsity regularizer, compelling the diffusion model to learn a compact and semantically sparse manifold. Then, during sampling time, we abandon the flawed sequential sampling paradigm and instead synchronously denoises the entire synthetic dataset with distribution regularizers. This framework systematically mitigates both identified distribution shifts. Experiments show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior computational efficiency.