Sharang Sriramu

SoftBinary Coding: A New Information-Theoretic Paradigm for Neural Compression via Fast Channel Simulation

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 continuous transforms t…