We consider lossy compression of an information source when the decoder has
lossless access to a correlated one. This setup, also known as the Wyner-Ziv
problem, is a special case of distributed source coding. To this day, practical
approaches for the Wyner-Ziv problem have neither been fully developed nor
heavily investigated. We propose a data-driven method based on machine learning
that leverages the universal function approximation capability of artificial
neural networks. We find that our neural network-based compression scheme,
based on variational vector quantization, recovers some principles of the
optimum theoretical solution of the Wyner-Ziv setup, such as binning in the
source space as well as optimal combination of the quantization index and side
information, for exemplary sources. These behaviors emerge although no
structure exploiting knowledge of the source distributions was imposed. Binning
is a widely used tool in information theoretic proofs and methods, and to our
knowledge, this is the first time it has been explicitly observed to emerge
from data-driven learning.Comment: draft of a journal version of our previous ISIT 2023 paper (available
at: arXiv:2305.04380). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:2305.0438