arxivcs.ITeess.SP2026-06-28
SoftBinary Coding: A New Information-Theoretic Neural Compression Paradigm
Ezgi Ozyilkan, Sharang M. Sriramu, Elza Erkip, Aaron B. Wagner, Jona Ballé
Neural compression is currently dominated by Nonlinear Transform Coding (NTC), which maps data to real-valued latents via continuous transforms. Despite its success, NTC suffers from train-test mismatch due to non-differentiable quantization, a ``smoothness bias" inherent in cont…