Mapping the Concept Landscape: Structural Perception of Global Distributions for Transparent Data Pruning

Abstract:Existing data pruning methods predominantly rely on high-dimensional feature embeddings to measure sample importance. However, these compressed vectors often obscure fine-grained semantic interactions, leading to suboptimal coverage of rare semantic concepts in the pruned subsets. In this paper, we propose Mapping the Concept Landscape (MCL), a novel structural perception framework for transparent data pruning. Instead of abstract embeddings, we represent each image-caption pair as an explicit sample-level graph comprising entities, events, and attributes. By integrating these individual graphs into a comprehensive dataset-level graph, we characterize the global distribution of semantic concepts and quantify their rarity across the entire corpus. Based on this structured perception, we develop a greedy concept-coverage maximization algorithm that iteratively selects samples to maximize the marginal gain of high-value, under-represented concepts. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior pruning efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods but also provides a transparent and interpretable audit trail for the selection process.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2608.22858 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.22858v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22858 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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