Dataset Distillation of 3D Point Clouds via Distribution Matching

Large-scale datasets are usually required to train deep neural networks; however, they increase computational complexity, hindering practical applications. Recently, dataset distillation for images and texts has attracted considerable attention, as it reduces the original dataset to a small synthetic one to alleviate the computational burden of training while preserving essential task-relevant information. However, dataset distillation for 3D point clouds remains largely unexplored, as point clouds exhibit fundamentally different characteristics from those of images, making this task more challenging. In this paper, we propose a distribution-matching-based distillation framework for 3D point clouds that jointly optimizes the geometric structures and orientations of synthetic 3D objects. To address the semantic misalignment caused by the unordered nature of point clouds, we introduce a Semantically Aligned Distribution Matching (SADM) loss, which is computed on the sorted features within each channel. Moreover, to handle rotational variations, we jointly learn optimal rotation angles while updating the synthetic dataset to better align with the original feature distribution. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing dataset distillation approaches, achieving higher accuracy and strong cross-architecture generalization.