In plain words: Instead of keeping every detail humans might notice, this compressor keeps only the information prediction tasks need after ignoring chosen changes like crops or flips. It shrank ImageNet images over 1000 times more than JPEG while leaving classification accuracy unchanged.
Abstract
Most data is automatically collected and only ever "seen" by algorithms. Yet, data compressors preserve perceptual fidelity rather than just the information needed by algorithms performing downstream tasks. In this paper, we characterize the bit-rate required to ensure high performance on all predictive tasks that are invariant under a set of transformations, such as data augmentations. Based on our theory, we design unsupervised objectives for training neural compressors. Using these objectives, we train a generic image compressor that achieves substantial rate savings (more than $1000\times$ on ImageNet) compared to JPEG on 8 datasets, without decreasing downstream classification performance.
Yann Dubois, Benjamin Bloem-Reddy, Karen Ullrich, Chris J. Maddison
arXiv:2106.10800 · cs.LG, cs.IT, stat.ML · submitted Jun 21, 2021 · updated Jan 28, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at NeurIPS 2021