Multimodal dataset distillation (MDD) aims to reduce the cost of vision-language pre-training by synthesizing compact image-text datasets. Although recent feature-matching methods have improved distillation efficiency, synthetic data may become specialized to the model representations encountered during optimization, limiting generalization to unseen model states.

We propose Model Distribution-Aware Multimodal Dataset Distillation (MDA-DD), which leverages supervision from a dynamic staggered queue of models at different training stages. We further introduce asymmetric dual projection for complementary alignment in visual and linguistic spaces and an uncentered second-order moment objective that retains mean-related cross-modal information.

Experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO demonstrate consistent retrieval improvements over existing methods across synthetic-data budgets. With only 100 synthetic pairs, MDA-DD improves IR@1 and TR@1 on Flickr30K by 12.9 and 18.2 percentage points, respectively, over the strongest baseline at the same budget, outperforming all compared methods using 500 pairs on both datasets across all six retrieval metrics.