A vector quantization approach to universal noiseless coding and quantization

A two-stage code is a block code in which each block of data is coded in two stages: the first stage codes the identity of a block code among a collection of codes, and the second stage codes the data using the identified code. The collection of codes may be noiseless codes, fixed-rate quantizers, or variable-rate quantizers. We take a vector quantization approach to two-stage coding, in which the first stage code can be regarded as a vector quantizer that “quantizes” the input data of length n to one of a fixed collection of block codes. We apply the generalized Lloyd algorithm to the first-stage quantizer, using induced measures of rate and distortion, to design locally optimal two-stage codes. On a source of medical images, two-stage variable-rate vector quantizers designed in this way outperform standard (one-stage) fixed-rate vector quantizers by over 9 dB. The tail of the operational distortion-rate function of the first-stage quantizer determines the optimal rate of convergence of the redundancy of a universal sequence of two-stage codes. We show that there exist two-stage universal noiseless codes, fixed-rate quantizers, and variable-rate quantizers whose per-letter rate and distortion redundancies converge to zero as (k/2)n -1 log n, when the universe of sources has finite dimension k. This extends the achievability part of Rissanen's theorem from universal noiseless codes to universal quantizers. Further, we show that the redundancies converge as O(n-1) when the universe of sources is countable, and as O(n-1+ϵ) when the universe of sources is infinite-dimensional, under appropriate conditions

A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder

The authors combine pruned tree-structured vector quantization (pruned TSVQ) with Itoh's (1987) universal noiseless coder. By combining pruned TSVQ with universal noiseless coding, they benefit from the “successive approximation” capabilities of TSVQ, thereby allowing progressive transmission of images, while retaining the ability to noiselessly encode images of unknown statistics in a provably asymptotically optimal fashion. Noiseless compression results are comparable to Ziv-Lempel and arithmetic coding for both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources

Quantized Estimation of Gaussian Sequence Models in Euclidean Balls

A central result in statistical theory is Pinsker's theorem, which characterizes the minimax rate in the normal means model of nonparametric estimation. In this paper, we present an extension to Pinsker's theorem where estimation is carried out under storage or communication constraints. In particular, we place limits on the number of bits used to encode an estimator, and analyze the excess risk in terms of this constraint, the signal size, and the noise level. We give sharp upper and lower bounds for the case of a Euclidean ball, which establishes the Pareto-optimal minimax tradeoff between storage and risk in this setting.Comment: Appearing at NIPS 201

Generative Adversarial User Privacy in Lossy Single-Server Information Retrieval

We propose to extend the concept of private information retrieval by allowing for distortion in the retrieval process and relaxing the perfect privacy requirement at the same time. In particular, we study the tradeoff between download rate, distortion, and user privacy leakage, and show that in the limit of large file sizes this trade-off can be captured via a novel information-theoretical formulation for datasets with a known distribution. Moreover, for scenarios where the statistics of the dataset is unknown, we propose a new deep learning framework by leveraging a generative adversarial network approach, which allows the user to learn efficient schemes from the data itself, minimizing the download cost. We evaluate the performance of the scheme on a synthetic Gaussian dataset as well as on both the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. For the MNIST dataset, the data-driven approach significantly outperforms a non-learning based scheme which combines source coding with multiple file download, while the CIFAR-10 performance is notably better.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for possible publication. This paper was presented in part at the NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Privacy Preserving Machine Learning - PRIML and PPML Joint Editio

Generative Compression

Traditional image and video compression algorithms rely on hand-crafted encoder/decoder pairs (codecs) that lack adaptability and are agnostic to the data being compressed. Here we describe the concept of generative compression, the compression of data using generative models, and suggest that it is a direction worth pursuing to produce more accurate and visually pleasing reconstructions at much deeper compression levels for both image and video data. We also demonstrate that generative compression is orders-of-magnitude more resilient to bit error rates (e.g. from noisy wireless channels) than traditional variable-length coding schemes

Design and multiplierless realization of digital synthesis filters for hybrid-filter-bank A/D converters

This paper studies the optimal least squares and minimax design and realization of digital synthesis filters for hybrid-filter-bank analog-to-digltal converters (HFB ADCs) to meet a given spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR). The problem for designing finite-impulse-response synthesis filters is formulated as a second-order cone-programming problem, which is convex and allows linear and quadratic constraints such as peak aliasing error to be incorporated. The fixed coefficients of the designed synthesis filters are efficiently implemented using sum-of-power-of-two (SOPOT) coefficients, while the internal word length used for each intermediate data is minimized using geometric programming. The main sources of error are analyzed, and a new formula of SFDR in terms of these errors is derived. The effects of component variations of analog analysis filters on the HFB ADC are also addressed by means of two new robust HFB ADC design algorithms based on stochastic uncertainty and worst case uncertainty models. Design results show that the proposed approach offers more flexibility and better performance than conventional methods in achieving a given SFDR and that the robust design algorithms are more robust to parameter uncertainties than the nominal design in which the uncertainties are not taken into account. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versio