Understanding how and why data distillation methods work is vital not only for improving these methods but also for revealing fundamental characteristics of "good" training data.

The synthetic datasets are expected to capture the essence of the knowledge contained in real-world datasets such that the former yields a similar performance as the latter.

One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting.

A counter-intuitive observation is that a more expansive teacher does not make a better student, but the reasons for this phenomenon remain unclear.

We present a new method for making diffusion models faster to sample.

Hinton et al. first propose the concept of distillation, where a lightweight student model