Dataset Distillation for Audio Classification: A Data-Efficient Alternative to Active Learning

Audio classification tasks like keyword spotting and acoustic event detection often require large labeled datasets, which are computationally expensive and impractical for resource-constrained devices. While active learning techniques attempt to reduce labeling efforts by selecting the most informative samples, they struggle with scalability in real-world scenarios involving thousands of audio segments. In this paper, we introduce an approach that leverages dataset distillation as an alternative strategy to active learning to address the challenge of data efficiency in real-world audio classification tasks. Our approach synthesizes compact, high-fidelity coresets that encapsulate the most critical information from the original dataset, significantly reducing the labeling requirements while offering competitive performance. Through experiments on three benchmark datasets -- Google Speech Commands, UrbanSound8K, and ESC-50, our approach achieves up to a ~3,000x reduction in data points, and requires only a negligible fraction of the original training data while matching the performance of popular active learning baselines.