Biologically Inspired Medical Multi-Modal Dataset Distillation via Contrast-Aware Alignment and Memory Compression

Multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis, yet its large-scale storage, privacy sensitivity, and annotation cost pose significant challenges. Inspired by biological vision systems, which integrate multi-sensory inputs and compress experiences into compact memory representations, we propose a bio-inspired framework termed Contrast-Guided Multi-modal Dataset Distillation (CGMDD). In biological perception, different sensory channels observe the same environment from complementary perspectives, while hierarchical neural processing ensures perceptual consistency across modalities. Meanwhile, memory systems such as the associated medial temporal lobe structures consolidate redundant experiences into efficient representations for long-term storage. Motivated by these principles, CGMDD treats multi-modal MRI as multi-view perceptual signals and introduces a hierarchical cross-modal contrastive learning mechanism that enforces perceptual alignment across modalities, analogous to multi-level processing in the visual cortex. Furthermore, we design a dynamic dataset distillation strategy that mimics memory consolidation by compressing large-scale data into compact, informative synthetic representations through gradient-based optimization. The proposed framework jointly optimizes perceptual alignment and memory compression in an end-to-end manner, achieving a biologically plausible integration of perception and learning. Experimental results on two MRI datasets demonstrate that CGMDD can compress the original dataset to 5% of its size while maintaining competitive performance, even with only 30% of the labels. These findings highlight the effectiveness of bio-inspired mechanisms in building efficient, robust, and privacy-preserving computer vision systems.