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arXiv:2606. 28027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural video codecs have surpassed classical codecs in coding efficiency but remain impractical for deployment due to cross-platform incompatibility and high computational cost.
LRConv-NeRV introduces low‑rank separable convolutions into the NeRV neural video decoder, replacing selected dense 3x3 layers to reduce computational load and memory usage. By applying low‑rank factorization progressively from the largest to earlier decoder stages, the method offers controllable trade‑offs between reconstruction quality and efficiency. Experiments show that applying LRConv only to the final decoder stage cuts decoder complexity by 68% and model size by 9.3% with negligible quality loss, while INT8 quantization preserves performance close to the dense baseline.
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.
High-Fidelity Video Quality Assessment (HFVQA) is a new framework that uses fixed-size spatio‑temporal patches across multiple scales, including the original resolution, to preserve low‑level quality cues and semantic context. It incorporates a lightweight auxiliary network that learns VQA‑specific saliency directly from quality supervision, enabling the model to focus on the most important spatio‑temporal regions. By combining high‑fidelity cues with task‑specific saliency, HFVQA achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on standard no‑reference VQA benchmarks while processing only about 12% of the candidate patches, making it computationally efficient.
Latent video generation relies on autoencoders to define a compact space in which generative models operate. Although video autoencoder architectures have evolved substantially, their latent spaces are still optimized primarily for pixel-level reconstruction and provide limited high-level semantic organization.
Scalable Neural Video Representation Compression (S-NVRC) introduces a scalable implicit neural representation (INR) video codec that supports fine-grained bitrate and decoding‑complexity scalability from a single embedded bitstream. It uses a coarse‑to‑fine prefix for feature grids and a nested prefix for network layers, enabling a wide range of operating points while maintaining a single encoding. On the UVG dataset, S‑NVRC outperforms SHM 12.4 and multi‑layer VTM‑20.0 by 43.7 % and 5.6 % in BD‑rate, respectively, and offers flexible complexity scalability.