arXiv:2604. 14603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The fundamental limit of natural signal compression has traditionally been characterized by classical rate-distortion (RD) theory through the tradeoff between coding rate and reconstruction distortion, while the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) framework introduces a divergence-based measure of perceptual quality as a modeling principle, leaving its theoretical origin unclear.
By Zijian Liang, Kai Niu, Changshuo Wang, Jin Xu, Ping Zhang
arXiv:2603. 01568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient coding theory predicts that biological perceptual systems compress sensory input optimally under resource constraints, with the systematic structure of errors reflecting the geometry of that compression.
By Leyla Roksan Caglar, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Baihan Lin
arXiv:2606. 00635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern VAEs are rarely trained with the pointwise likelihood implied by the standard $\beta$-VAE objective.
By Giorgio Strano, Luca Cerovaz, Michele Mancusi, Tommaso Mencattini, Emanuele Rodol\`a
Most existing extreme compression methods fail to achieve an optimal rate-distortion-perception trade-off, as they typically prioritize perceptual fidelity and visual realism over pixel-level accuracy. Consequently, the resulting reconstructions often deviate noticeably from the originals.
arXiv:2606. 12858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional communication systems, including both separation-based coding and learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC), are typically designed under Shannon's rate-distortion theory.
By Tong Wu, Zhiyong Chen, Guo Lu, Li Song, Feng Yang, Meixia Tao, Wenjun Zhang
arXiv:2601. 22002v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers achieve superior performance on many tasks, but impose heavy compute and memory requirements during inference.
By Anderson de Andrade, Alon Harell, Ivan V. Baji\'c
The paper investigates the limits of the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR²) framework for out‑of‑distribution (OOD) generalisation. It shows that MCR² can lead to complete prediction failure under distribution shift, even when a perfectly stable feature is available, and that adding invariance principles from IRM or REx does not resolve this issue. The authors conclude that additional assumptions or learning principles are needed to guarantee stable OOD predictions with MCR².
By Menghui Zhou, Gaoshan Bi, Vitaveska Lanfranchi, Po Yang
The paper introduces the concept of Information Capacity (IC) to quantify how much bandwidth savings a unit of decoder compute can achieve in generative video compression (GVC). By modeling reconstruction quality as a two‑factor power law in data rate and compute, the authors fit measured DISTS of two GVC decoders with high accuracy and define IC as the negative logarithmic slope along an iso‑quality contour. IC is dimensionless, enabling architecture‑agnostic comparisons and revealing that a 14B decoder trades compute for rate far more efficiently than a 1.3B decoder, with significant variation across datasets.
By Cheng Yuan, Jiawei Shao, Xuelong Li
The paper introduces a pragmatic information theory that unifies communication, control, and decision-making through the isoteleia mapping, which formalizes equifinality by treating distinct semantic paths that lead to the same optimal action as pragmatically equivalent. It establishes a three-tier hierarchy of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, defines pragmatic entropy, mutual information, channel capacity, and rate-distortion, and proves coding theorems that generalize Shannon’s results. The authors also present pragmatic value and cost of information, a Lagrangian dual framework for cross-layer optimization, and a pragmatic efficiency bound that quantifies the maximum net utility for resource-constrained intelligent systems, extending the theory to continuous messages and dynamic settings.
By Kai Niu, Ping Zhang
arXiv:2505. 23869v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A proposition that connects randomness and compression is put forward via Gibbs entropy over set of measurement vectors associated with a compression process.
By M. S\"uzen
This article reviews recent diffusion‑based methods for generative lossy image compression, highlighting how these techniques encode a source into an embedding and use a diffusion model to iteratively refine the reconstruction during decoding. It discusses the role of auxiliary entropy models for transmitting the embedding, explores the use of diffusion models for information transmission via channel simulation, and frames the discussion within rate‑distortion‑perception theory, common randomness, and inverse‑problem connections. The review also identifies open challenges in the field.
By Yibo Yang, Stephan Mandt
The paper introduces a unified rate–distortion framework for discrete visual tokenization, encompassing vector, product, and scalar quantization. It shows that minimizing distortion, rather than maximizing codebook utilization, is the key objective for reconstruction fidelity and establishes fairness conditions for comparing quantizers. Under these conditions, the study confirms the distortion hierarchy VQ–PQ–SQ and demonstrates that modern VQ methods achieve the lowest distortion.
By Xianghong Fang, Wenlong Mou, Yuan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Tim G. J. Rudner