# Comprehensive Comparisons of Uniform Quantization in Deep Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Learned Image Compression with Discretized Gaussian Mixture Likelihoods and Attention Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01568/) (2020)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Compressive Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00395/) (2017)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Soft Quantization: Bridging Full-Precision and Low-Bit Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05033/) (2019)
- [Checkerboard Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15306/) (2021)
- [Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05148/) (2016)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [Soft-to-Hard Vector Quantization for End-to-End Learning Compressible Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00648/) (2017)
- [The Devil Is in the Details: Window-based Attention for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08450/) (2022)
- [Context-adaptive Entropy Model for End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10452/) (2018)
- [Conditional Probability Models for Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04260/) (2018)
- [Density Modeling of Images using a Generalized Normalization Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06281/) (2015)
- [Variable Rate Deep Image Compression With a Conditional Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04802/) (2019)
- [Improved Lossy Image Compression with Priming and Spatially Adaptive Bit Rates for Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10114/) (2017)
- [Non-local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09757/) (2019)
- [Image and Video Compression with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03567/) (2019)
- [Asymmetric Gained Deep Image Compression With Continuous Rate Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02012/) (2020)
- [Improving Inference for Neural Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04240/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Generalized Gaussian Model for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19320/) (2024)
- [VeriFlow: Modeling Distributions for Neural Network Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14265/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Learned Image Compression on Scalar and Entropy-Constraint Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08662/) (2025)
- [From Fewer Samples to Fewer Bits: Reframing Dataset Distillation as Joint Optimization of Precision and Compactness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02411/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In deep image compression, uniform quantization is applied to latent representations obtained by using an auto-encoder architecture for reducing bits and entropy coding. Quantization is a problem encountered in the end-to-end training of deep image compression. Quantization's gradient is zero, and it cannot backpropagate meaningful gradients. Many methods have been proposed to address the approximations of quantization to obtain gradients. However, there have not been equitable comparisons among them. In this study, we comprehensively compare the existing approximations of uniform quantization. Furthermore, we evaluate possible combinations of quantizers for the decoder and the entropy model, as the approximated quantizers can be different for them. We conduct experiments using three network architectures on two test datasets. The experimental results reveal that the best approximated quantization differs by the network architectures, and the best approximations of the three are different from the original ones used for the architectures. We also show that the combination of quantizers that uses universal quantization for the entropy model and differentiable soft quantization for the decoder is a comparatively good choice for different architectures and datasets.