# Multi-Scale Invertible Neural Network for Wide-Range Variable-Rate Learned Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [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)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [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)
- [The Reversible Residual Network: Backpropagation Without Storing Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04585/) (2017)
- [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)
- [i-RevNet: Deep Invertible Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07088/) (2018)
- [Nonlinear Transform Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03034/) (2020)
- [Variable Rate Deep Image Compression With a Conditional Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04802/) (2019)
- [Entroformer: A Transformer-based Entropy Model for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05492/) (2022)
- [Enhanced Invertible Encoding for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03690/) (2021)
- [Non-local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09757/) (2019)
- [Invertible Image Rescaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05650/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Gained Deep Image Compression With Continuous Rate Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02012/) (2020)
- [A Unified End-to-End Framework for Efficient Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03370/) (2020)
- [Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression through Spatially-Adaptive Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09551/) (2021)
- [Joint Global and Local Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04487/) (2021)
- [Contextformer: A Transformer with Spatio-Channel Attention for Context Modeling in Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02452/) (2022)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10486/) (2020)

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

- [Machines Serve Human: A Novel Variable Human-machine Collaborative Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08915/) (2025)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression via N-Gram Context based Swin-transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00058/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13957/) (2026)
- [Visual Token Codec: Unleashing Spatial Redundancy for ViT Feature Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08832/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autoencoder-based structures have dominated recent learned image compression methods. However, the inherent information loss associated with autoencoders limits their rate-distortion performance at high bit rates and restricts their flexibility of rate adaptation. In this paper, we present a variable-rate image compression model based on invertible transform to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we design a lightweight multi-scale invertible neural network, which bijectively maps the input image into multi-scale latent representations. To improve the compression efficiency, a multi-scale spatial-channel context model with extended gain units is devised to estimate the entropy of the latent representation from high to low levels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing variable-rate methods, and remains competitive with recent multi-model approaches. Notably, our method is the first learned image compression solution that outperforms VVC across a very wide range of bit rates using a single model, especially at high bit rates. The source code is available at https://github.com/hytu99/MSINN-VRLIC.