Large-scale Dataset Pruning with Dynamic Uncertainty

Abstract

The state of the art of many learning tasks, e.g., image classification, is advanced by collecting larger datasets and then training larger models on them. As the outcome, the increasing computational cost is becoming unaffordable. In this paper, we investigate how to prune the large-scale datasets, and thus produce an informative subset for training sophisticated deep models with negligible performance drop. We propose a simple yet effective dataset pruning method by exploring both the prediction uncertainty and training dynamics. We study dataset pruning by measuring the variation of predictions during the whole training process on large-scale datasets, i.e., ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K, and advanced models, i.e., Swin Transformer and ConvNeXt. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the state of the art and achieves 25% lossless pruning ratio on both ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K. The code and pruned datasets are available at https://github.com/BAAI-DCAI/Dataset-Pruning.