{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-improved-upper-bound-on-the-rate","title":"An Improved Upper Bound on the Rate-Distortion Function of Images","arxiv_id":"2309.02574","date":"2023-09-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhihao Duan","Jack Ma","Jiangpeng He","Fengqing Zhu"],"abstract":"Recent work has shown that Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) can be used to upper-bound the information rate-distortion (R-D) function of images, i.e., the fundamental limit of lossy image compression. In this paper, we report an improved upper bound on the R-D function of images implemented by (1) introducing a new VAE model architecture, (2) applying variable-rate compression techniques, and (3) proposing a novel \\ourfunction{} to stabilize training. We demonstrate that at least 30\\% BD-rate reduction w.r.t. the intra prediction mode in VVC codec is achievable, suggesting that there is still great potential for improving lossy image compression. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02574v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02574v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-improved-upper-bound-on-the-rate","repo_url":"https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-compression","task_name":"Image Compression"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}