Beyond Background Bias: Saliency-Driven Prototype Alignment for Dataset Distillation

Abstract

Dataset distillation aims to synthesize compact datasets that can approximate the performance of full-data training while significantly reducing computational and storage costs. However, diffusion-based distillation methods often struggle to preserve structural coherence and generalization, especially in visually complex domains. This issue often stems from latent prototypes that are weakly aligned with class-discriminative regions and contaminated by irrelevant background, thereby degrading generation quality and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose a saliency-driven distillation framework that constructs class-discriminative latent prototypes to enhance representativeness and generalization. The framework proceeds in two stages: (1) ensemble Grad-CAM saliency is used to construct prototypes emphasizing high-confidence regions, and (2) hard prototype refinement is then applied to construct challenging yet class-consistent prototypes, thereby enhancing discriminability and diversity. Importantly, the diffusion backbones (e.g., LDM and DiT) remain frozen; only lightweight classifiers used for saliency extraction are trained. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements over strong baselines. Code will be released.