{"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/compressing-images-by-encoding-their-latent","title":"Compressing Images by Encoding Their Latent Representations with Relative Entropy Coding","arxiv_id":"2010.01185","date":"2020-10-02","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Gergely Flamich","Marton Havasi","José Miguel Hernández-Lobato"],"abstract":"Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have seen widespread use in learned image compression. They are used to learn expressive latent representations on which downstream compression methods can operate with high efficiency. Recently proposed 'bits-back' methods can indirectly encode the latent representation of images with codelength close to the relative entropy between the latent posterior and the prior. However, due to the underlying algorithm, these methods can only be used for lossless compression, and they only achieve their nominal efficiency when compressing multiple images simultaneously; they are inefficient for compressing single images. As an alternative, we propose a novel method, Relative Entropy Coding (REC), that can directly encode the latent representation with codelength close to the relative entropy for single images, supported by our empirical results obtained on the Cifar10, ImageNet32 and Kodak datasets. Moreover, unlike previous bits-back methods, REC is immediately applicable to lossy compression, where it is competitive with the state-of-the-art on the Kodak dataset.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01185v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.01185v6.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":"compressing-images-by-encoding-their-latent","repo_url":"https://github.com/gergely-flamich/relative-entropy-coding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-compression","task_name":"Image Compression"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.01185","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2010.01185"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/gergely-flamich/relative-entropy-coding","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"73b28d07dc4d8995","entry":"print_dict","repo":"gergely-flamich/relative-entropy-coding","repo_kind":"official","path":"examples/lossless/train_generative_model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/gergely-flamich/relative-entropy-coding/blob/HEAD/examples/lossless/train_generative_model.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"73b28d07dc4d8995"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}