# Extreme Generative Image Compression by Learning Text Embedding from Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion for compression and wireless, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 50 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion for compression and wireless](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-for-compression-and-wireless/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Neural Video Compression with Feature Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17414/) (2024)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Image Denoising: The Deep Learning Revolution and Beyond -- A Survey Paper --](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03362/) (2023)
- [Text + Sketch: Image Compression at Ultra Low Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01944/) (2023)
- [Towards Extreme Image Compression with Latent Feature Guidance and Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18820/) (2024)
- [A Residual Diffusion Model for High Perceptual Quality Codec Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05489/) (2023)
- [MISC: Ultra-low Bitrate Image Semantic Compression Driven by Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16749/) (2024)
- [Neural Image Compression with Text-guided Encoding for both Pixel-level and Perceptual Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02944/) (2024)
- [Ultra Lowrate Image Compression with Semantic Residual Coding and Compression-aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08281/) (2025)
- [PerCo (SD): Open Perceptual Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20255/) (2024)
- [Semantics-Guided Diffusion for Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding in Wireless Image Transmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01138/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap between Gaussian Diffusion Models and Universal Quantization for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02579/) (2025)
- [When is an Embedding Model More Promising than Another?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07640/) (2024)
- [Controllable Distortion-Perception Tradeoff Through Latent Diffusion for Neural Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11379/) (2024)
- [Extremely low-bitrate Image Compression Semantically Disentangled by LMMs from a Human Perception Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00399/) (2025)
- [DiT-IC: Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Efficient Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13162/) (2026)
- [High Frequency Matters: Uncertainty Guided Image Compression with Wavelet Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12538/) (2024)
- [Steering One-Step Diffusion Model with Fidelity-Rich Decoder for Fast Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04979/) (2025)
- [Learning Task-Agnostic Representations through Multi-Teacher Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18680/) (2025)
- [Diff-ICMH: Harmonizing Machine and Human Vision in Image Compression with Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22549/) (2025)
- [Promptus: Can Prompts Streaming Replace Video Streaming with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20032/) (2024)
- [Map-Assisted Remote-Sensing Image Compression at Extremely Low Bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01935/) (2024)
- [Enhancing the Rate-Distortion-Perception Flexibility of Learned Image Codecs with Conditional Diffusion Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02887/) (2024)
- [Higher fidelity perceptual image and video compression with a latent conditioned residual denoising diffusion model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13152/) (2025)
- [TextBoost: Boosting Scene Text Fidelity in Ultra-low Bitrate Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04115/) (2026)
- [A Noise Constrained Diffusion (NC-Diffusion) Framework for High Fidelity Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06568/) (2026)
- [Fine color guidance in diffusion models and its application to image compression at extremely low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06865/) (2024)
- [PerCoV2: Ultra-Low Bit-Rate Perceptual Image Compression via Query-Based 1D Multimodal Image Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09368/) (2025)
- [Generative Semantic Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Visual Communication and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27324/) (2025)
- [Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02849/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transferring large amount of high resolution images over limited bandwidth is an important but very challenging task. Compressing images using extremely low bitrates (<0.1 bpp) has been studied but it often results in low quality images of heavy artifacts due to the strong constraint in the number of bits available for the compressed data. It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words but on the other hand, language is very powerful in capturing the essence of an image using short descriptions. With the recent success of diffusion models for text-to-image generation, we propose a generative image compression method that demonstrates the potential of saving an image as a short text embedding which in turn can be used to generate high-fidelity images which is equivalent to the original one perceptually. For a given image, its corresponding text embedding is learned using the same optimization process as the text-to-image diffusion model itself, using a learnable text embedding as input after bypassing the original transformer. The optimization is applied together with a learning compression model to achieve extreme compression of low bitrates <0.1 bpp. Based on our experiments measured by a comprehensive set of image quality metrics, our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art deep learning methods in terms of both perceptual quality and diversity.