[CVPR 2026] ManifoldGD: Training-Free Hierarchical Manifold Guidance for Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation

Ayush Roy¹ · Wei-Yang Alex Lee¹ · Rudrasis Chakraborty² · Vishnu Suresh Lokhande¹

¹ University at Buffalo, SUNY • ² Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL)

Abstract

In recent times, large datasets hinder efficient model training while also containing redundant concepts. Dataset distillation aims to synthesize compact datasets that preserve the knowledge of large-scale training sets while drastically reducing storage and computation. Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled training-free distillation by leveraging pre-trained generative priors; however, existing guidance strategies remain limited. Current score-based methods either perform unguided denoising or rely on simple mode-based guidance toward instance prototype centroids (IPC centroids), which often are rudimentary and suboptimal. We propose Manifold-Guided Distillation (ManifoldGD), a training-free diffusion-based framework that integrates manifold consistent guidance at every denoising timestep. Our method employs IPCs computed via a hierarchical, divisive clustering of VAE latent features—yielding a multi-scale coreset of IPCs that captures both coarse semantic modes and fine intra-class variability. Using a local neighborhood of the extracted IPC centroids, we create the latent manifold for each diffusion denoising timestep. At each denoising step, we project the mode-alignment vector onto the local tangent space of the estimated latent manifold, thus constraining the generation trajectory to remain manifold-faithful while preserving semantic consistency. This formulation improves representativeness, diversity, and image fidelity without requiring any model retraining. Empirical results demonstrate consistent gains over existing training-free and training-based baselines in terms of FID, $\ell_2$ distance among real and synthetic dataset embeddings, and classification accuracy, establishing ManifoldGD as the first geometry-aware training-free data distillation framework.

Installation

Clone the repository and run the following commands.

conda create --name manifoldgd python=3.8
conda activate manifoldgd
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To run the code, please edit the following command according to the requirement (please edit the paths inside the script according to your setup). (METHOD_NAMES = dit, mgd, manifoldgd || DATASET_NAME = nette, imagenet100, imagenet1k, woof)

bash [DATASET_NAME]_[METHOD_NAME].sh

To get the results for FID (fid.sh), Representativeness-Diversity (rep_div.sh), KL divergence (dataset.sh) please run the appropriate bash files and edit the paths.

Qualitative Results

Acknowledgements

We borrow code from MVFA (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.12570) and thank the authors for making the code public.

Citation

@article{roy2026manifoldgd,
  title={ManifoldGD: Training-Free Hierarchical Manifold Guidance for Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation},
  author={Roy, Ayush and Lee, Wei-Yang Alex and Chakraborty, Rudrasis and Lokhande, Vishnu Suresh},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.23295},
  year={2026}
}