Diversity Without Labels: Task-Agnostic Coreset Selection Across Perception and Action

While data collection for model training is relatively easy, curating high-quality datasets from large collections is inherently challenging. Coreset estimation methods address this problem by identifying the best data subsets to train models on. However, existing approaches often require proxy model training, extensive annotations, or task-specific tailoring. Unsupervised alternatives typically exploit geometric properties in foundation model feature spaces, but are limited to pairwise image-to-image comparisons or comparisons against a fixed subset. We introduce CoreDNA, an unsupervised, task-agnostic coreset estimation approach that pools neuron activations from vision foundation models into per-image and per-dataset distributions. By comparing each image’s distribution to the dataset-level distribution, CoreDNA can capture both low-level visual structure and high-level semantic information across layers. We find that high-quality samples concentrate in the tails of the last layer’s activation statistics, which we validate by relating them to training-based coreset methods. Building on these findings, we develop a computationally efficient selection mechanism to construct task-agnostic, high-quality coresets for selective annotation and model training. Across image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and imitation learning for end-to-end driving and mobile manipulation, CoreDNA matches or outperforms the state of the art, demonstrating unprecedented generalization across perception and action tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of compact activation-based representations for data selection.