Dataset distillation has become a popular method for compressing large datasets into smaller, more efficient representations while preserving critical information for model training. Data features are broadly categorized into two types: instance-specific features, which capture unique, fine-grained details of individual examples, and class-general features, which represent shared, broad patterns across a class. However, previous approaches often struggle to balance these features—some focus solely on class-general patterns, neglecting finer instance details, while others prioritize instance-specific features, overlooking the shared characteristics essential for class-level understanding. In this paper, we introduce the Non-Critical Region Refinement Dataset Distillation (NRR-DD) method, which preserves instance-specific details and fine-grained regions in synthetic data while enriching non-critical regions with class-general information. This approach enables models to leverage all pixel information, capturing both feature types and enhancing overall performance. Additionally, we present Distance-Based Representative (DBR) knowledge transfer, which eliminates the need for soft labels in training by relying on the distance between synthetic data predictions and one-hot encoded labels. Experimental results show that NRR-DD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both small- and large-scale datasets. Furthermore, by storing only two distances per instance, our method delivers comparable results across various settings. The code is available at https://github.com/tmtuan1307/NRR-DD.

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) is an underexplored yet pivotal issue, involving the dynamic addition of new classes in the context of federated learning. In this field, Data-Free Knowledge Transfer (DFKT) plays a crucial role in addressing catastrophic forgetting and data privacy problems. However, prior approaches lack the crucial synergy between DFKT and the model training phases, causing DFKT to encounter difficulties in generating high-quality data from a non-anchored latent space of the old task model. In this paper, we introduce LANDER (Label Text Centered Data-Free Knowledge Transfer) to address this issue by utilizing label text embeddings (LTE) produced by pretrained language models. Specifically, during the model training phase, our approach treats LTE as anchor points and constrains the feature embeddings of corresponding training samples around them, enriching the surrounding area with more meaningful information. In the DFKT phase, by using these LTE anchors, LANDER can synthesize more meaningful samples, thereby effectively addressing the forgetting problem. Additionally, instead of tightly constraining embeddings toward the anchor, the Bounding Loss is introduced to encourage sample embeddings to remain flexible within a defined radius. This approach preserves the natural differences in sample embeddings and mitigates the embedding overlap caused by heterogeneous federated settings. Extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet demonstrate that LANDER significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in FCIL. The code is available at https://github.com/tmtuan1307/lander.

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has made significant recent strides by transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student neural network without accessing the original data. Nonetheless, existing approaches encounter a significant challenge when attempting to generate samples from random noise inputs, which inherently lack meaningful information. Consequently, these models struggle to effectively map this noise to the ground-truth sample distribution, resulting in prolonging training times and low-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Noisy Layer Generation method (NAYER) which re-locates the random source from the input to a noisy layer and utilizes the meaningful constant label-text embedding (LTE) as the input. LTE is generated by using the language model once, and then it is stored in memory for all subsequent training processes. The significance of LTE lies in its ability to contain substantial meaningful inter-class information, enabling the generation of high-quality samples with only a few training steps. Simultaneously, the noisy layer plays a key role in addressing the issue of diversity in sample generation by preventing the model from overemphasizing the constrained label information. By reinitializing the noisy layer in each iteration, we aim to facilitate the generation of diverse samples while still retaining the method's efficiency, thanks to the ease of learning provided by LTE. Experiments carried out on multiple datasets demonstrate that our NAYER not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods but also achieves speeds 5 to 15 times faster than previous approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/tmtuan1307/nayer.

Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has attracted significant research attention due to its diverse real-world applications. Recently, exploiting transformers for MTSC has achieved state-of the-art performance. However, existing methods focus on generic features, providing a comprehensive understanding of data, but they ignore class-specific features crucial for learning the representative characteristics of each class. This leads to poor performance in the case of imbalanced datasets or datasets with similar overall patterns but differing in minor class-specific details. In this paper, we propose a novel Shapelet Transformer (ShapeFormer), which comprises class-specific and generic transformer modules to capture both of these features. In the class-specific module, we introduce the discovery method to extract the discriminative subsequences of each class (i.e. shapelets) from the training set. We then propose a Shapelet Filter to learn the difference features between these shapelets and the input time series. We found that the difference feature for each shapelet contains important class-specific features, as it shows a significant distinction between its class and others. In the generic module, convolution filters are used to extract generic features that contain information to distinguish among all classes. For each module, we employ the transformer encoder to capture the correlation between their features. As a result, the combination of two transformer modules allows our model to exploit the power of both types of features, thereby enhancing the classification performance. Our experiments on 30 UEA MTSC datasets demonstrate that ShapeFormer has achieved the highest accuracy ranking compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xuanmay2701/shapeformer.