“Bit-Swap: Recursive Bits-Back Coding for Lossless Compression With Hierarchical Latent Variables”, Friso H. Kingma, Pieter Abbeel, Jonathan Ho2019-05-16 (autoencoder NN, compression)⁠:

The bits-back argument suggests that latent variable models can be turned into lossless compression schemes. Translating the bits-back argument into efficient and practical lossless compression schemes for general latent variable models, however, is still an open problem.

Bits-Back with Asymmetric Numeral Systems (BB-ANS), recently proposed by Townsend et al 2019, makes bits-back coding practically feasible for latent variable models with one latent layer, but it is inefficient for hierarchical latent variable models.

In this paper we propose Bit-Swap, a new compression scheme that generalizes BB-ANS and achieves strictly better compression rates for hierarchical latent variable models with Markov chain structure.

Through experiments we verify that Bit-Swap results in lossless compression rates that are empirically superior to existing techniques.

Our implementation is available at Github.