Dataset distillation or condensation aims to condense a large-scale training dataset into a much smaller synthetic one such that the training performance of distilled and original sets on neural networks are similar. Although the number of training samples can be reduced substantially, current state-of-the-art methods heavily rely on enormous soft labels to achieve satisfactory performance. As a result, the required storage can be comparable even to original datasets, especially for large-scale ones. To solve this problem, instead of storing these heavy labels, we propose a novel label-lightening framework termed HeLlO aiming at effective image-to-label projectors, with which synthetic labels can be directly generated online from synthetic images. Specifically, to construct such projectors, we leverage prior knowledge in open-source foundation models, e.g., CLIP, and introduce a LoRA-like fine-tuning strategy to mitigate the gap between pre-trained and target distributions, so that original models for soft-label generation can be distilled into a group of low-rank matrices. Moreover, an effective image optimization method is proposed to further mitigate the potential error between the original and distilled label generators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with only about 0.003% of the original storage required for a complete set of soft labels, we achieve comparable performance to current state-of-the-art dataset distillation methods on large-scale datasets. Our code will be available.

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, training models for high-resolution image generation remains challenging, particularly when training data and computational resources are limited. In this paper, we explore this practical problem from two key perspectives: data and parameter efficiency, and propose a set of key guidelines for ultra-resolution adaptation termed URAE. For data efficiency, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that synthetic data generated by some teacher models can significantly promote training convergence. For parameter efficiency, we find that tuning minor components of the weight matrices outperforms widely-used low-rank adapters when synthetic data are unavailable, offering substantial performance gains while maintaining efficiency. Additionally, for models leveraging guidance distillation, such as FLUX, we show that disabling classifier-free guidance, i.e., setting the guidance scale to 1 during adaptation, is crucial for satisfactory performance. Extensive experiments validate that URAE achieves comparable 2K-generation performance to state-of-the-art closed-source models like FLUX1.1 [Pro] Ultra with only 3K samples and 2K iterations, while setting new benchmarks for 4K-resolution generation. Codes are available [here](https://github.com/Huage001/URAE).

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have garnered considerable attention for their ability to tackle complex tasks through the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approach. However, their tendency toward overthinking results in unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains, dramatically increasing the inference costs. To mitigate this issue, we introduce VeriThinker, a novel approach for CoT compression. Unlike conventional methods that fine-tune LRMs directly on the original reasoning task using synthetic concise CoT data, we innovatively fine-tune the model solely through an auxiliary verification task. By training LRMs to accurately verify the correctness of CoT solutions, the LRMs inherently become more discerning about the necessity of subsequent self-reflection steps, thereby effectively suppressing overthinking. Extensive experiments validate that VeriThinker substantially reduces reasoning chain lengths while maintaining or even slightly improving accuracy. When applied to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, our approach reduces reasoning tokens on MATH500 from 3790 to 2125 while improving accuracy by 0.8% (94.0% to 94.8%), and on AIME25, tokens decrease from 14321 to 10287 with a 2.1% accuracy gain (38.7% to 40.8%). Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that VeriThinker can also be zero-shot generalized to speculative reasoning.

Adversarial attacks constitute a notable threat to machine learning systems, given their potential to induce erroneous predictions and classifications. However, within real-world contexts, the essential specifics of the deployed model are frequently treated as a black box, consequently mitigating the vulnerability to such attacks. Thus, enhancing the transferability of the adversarial samples has become a crucial area of research, which heavily relies on selecting appropriate surrogate models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that generates adversarial attacks in a mutual-modality optimization scheme. Our approach is accomplished by leveraging the pre-trained CLIP model. Firstly, we conduct a visual attack on the clean image that causes semantic perturbations on the aligned embedding space with the other textual modality. Then, we apply the corresponding defense on the textual modality by updating the prompts, which forces the re-matching on the perturbed embedding space. Finally, to enhance the attack transferability, we utilize the iterative training strategy on the visual attack and the textual defense, where the two processes optimize from each other. We evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our mutual-modal attack strategy can effectively produce high-transferable attacks, which are stable regardless of the target networks. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art attack methods and can be readily deployed as a plug-and-play solution.

The proliferation of large-scale AI models trained on extensive datasets has revolutionized machine learning. With these models taking on increasingly central roles in various applications, the need to understand their behavior and enhance interpretability has become paramount. To investigate the impact of changes in training data on a pre-trained model, a common approach is leave-one-out re-training. This entails systematically altering the training dataset by removing specific samples to observe resulting changes within the model. However, retraining the model for each altered dataset presents a significant computational challenge, given the need to perform this operation for every dataset variation. In this paper, we introduce an efficient framework for assessing data impact, comprising offline training and online evaluation stages. During the offline training phase, we approximate the influence of training data on the target model through a distilled synset, formulated as a reversed gradient matching problem. For online evaluation, we expedite the leave-one-out process using the synset, which is then utilized to compute the attribution matrix based on the evaluation objective. Experimental evaluations, including training data attribution and assessments of data quality, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves comparable model behavior evaluation while significantly speeding up the process compared to the direct retraining method.

Recent success of deep learning is largely attributed to the sheer amount of data used for training deep neural networks. Despite the unprecedented success, the massive data, unfortunately, significantly increases the burden on storage and transmission and further gives rise to a cumbersome model training process. Besides, relying on the raw data for training per se yields concerns about privacy and copyright. To alleviate these shortcomings, dataset distillation (DD), also known as dataset condensation (DC), was introduced and has recently attracted much research attention in the community. Given an original dataset, DD aims to derive a much smaller dataset containing synthetic samples, based on which the trained models yield performance comparable with those trained on the original dataset. In this paper, we give a comprehensive review and summary of recent advances in DD and its application. We first introduce the task formally and propose an overall algorithmic framework followed by all existing DD methods. Next, we provide a systematic taxonomy of current methodologies in this area, and discuss their theoretical interconnections. We also present current challenges in DD through extensive empirical studies and envision possible directions for future works.