# Large Language Model for Lossless Image Compression with Visual Prompts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (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)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Language Modeling Is Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10668/) (2023)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [Checkerboard Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15306/) (2021)
- [The Devil Is in the Details: Window-based Attention for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08450/) (2022)
- [Practical Full Resolution Learned Lossless Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12817/) (2018)
- [LISA++: An Improved Baseline for Reasoning Segmentation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17240/) (2023)
- [MLIC++: Linear Complexity Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15421/) (2023)
- [Frequency-Aware Transformer for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16387/) (2023)
- [Frozen Transformers in Language Models Are Effective Visual Encoder Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12973/) (2023)
- [PIRM Challenge on Perceptual Image Enhancement on Smartphones: Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01641/) (2018)
- [Learning Better Lossless Compression Using Lossy Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10184/) (2020)
- [iVPF: Numerical Invertible Volume Preserving Flow for Efficient Lossless Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16211/) (2021)
- [iFlow: Numerically Invertible Flows for Efficient Lossless Compression via a Uniform Coder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00965/) (2021)
- [Deep Lossy Plus Residual Coding for Lossless and Near-lossless Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04847/) (2022)
- [LM4LV: A Frozen Large Language Model for Low-level Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15734/) (2024)
- [aiWave: Volumetric Image Compression with 3-D Trained Affine Wavelet-like Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05822/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning to See Before Seeing: Demystifying LLM Visual Priors from Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26625/) (2025)
- [Can You Learn to See Without Images? Procedural Warm-Up for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13945/) (2025)
- [Joint Lossless Compression and Steganography for Medical Images via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01782/) (2025)
- [Content-Aware Mamba for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02192/) (2025)
- [Next-Frame Decoding for Ultra-Low-Bitrate Image Compression with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15129/) (2026)
- [DualComp: End-to-End Learning of a Unified Dual-Modality Lossless Compressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16256/) (2025)
- [Scaling Learned Image Compression Models up to 1 Billion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09075/) (2025)
- [Compression Tells Intelligence: Visual Coding, Visual Token Technology, and the Unification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20742/) (2026)
- [OmniZip: Learning a Unified and Lightweight Lossless Compressor for Multi-Modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22286/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Learned Image Compression with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25316/) (2026)
- [Adapting Diffusion Language Models for Lossless Pixel-Level Image Transmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06273/) (2026)
- [NeuralLVC: Neural Lossless Video Compression via Masked Diffusion with Temporal Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03353/) (2026)
- [LUMI: Tokenizer-Agnostic LLM-Based Lossless Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08221/) (2026)
- [FLM: Frequency-Aware Language Models for Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28687/) (2026)
- [Procedural Core: A Compact Recurrent Initialization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37631/) (2026)
- [Recasting DiT for Extreme Image Compression with Hierarchical Visual Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in deep learning have driven significant progress in lossless image compression. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), preliminary attempts have been made to leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in these pretrained models to enhance lossless image compression, particularly by improving the entropy model. However, a significant challenge remains in bridging the gap between the textual prior knowledge within LLMs and lossless image compression. To tackle this challenge and unlock the potential of LLMs, this paper introduces a novel paradigm for lossless image compression that incorporates LLMs with visual prompts. Specifically, we first generate a lossy reconstruction of the input image as visual prompts, from which we extract features to serve as visual embeddings for the LLM. The residual between the original image and the lossy reconstruction is then fed into the LLM along with these visual embeddings, enabling the LLM to function as an entropy model to predict the probability distribution of the residual. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art compression performance, surpassing both traditional and learning-based lossless image codecs. Furthermore, our approach can be easily extended to images from other domains, such as medical and screen content images, achieving impressive performance. These results highlight the potential of LLMs for lossless image compression and may inspire further research in related directions.