# Partial Updates: Losing Information for Freshness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Age of Information in Deep Learning-Driven Task-Oriented Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04298/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider an information updating system where a source produces updates as requested by a transmitter. The transmitter further processes these updates in order to generate partial updates, which have smaller information compared to the original updates, to be sent to a receiver. We study the problem of generating partial updates, and finding their corresponding real-valued codeword lengths, in order to minimize the average age experienced by the receiver, while maintaining a desired level of mutual information between the original and partial updates. This problem is NP hard. We relax the problem and develop an alternating minimization based iterative algorithm that generates a pmf for the partial updates, and the corresponding age-optimal real-valued codeword length for each update. We observe that there is a tradeoff between the attained average age and the mutual information between the original and partial updates.