# From Noise to Latent: Generating Gaussian Latents for INR-Based Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08009 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08009/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [COIN: COmpression with Implicit Neural representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03123/) (2021)
- [MLIC: Multi-Reference Entropy Model for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07273/) (2022)
- [COIN++: Neural Compression Across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12904/) (2022)
- [C3: High-performance and low-complexity neural compression from a single image or video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02753/) (2023)
- [COOL-CHIC: Coordinate-based Low Complexity Hierarchical Image Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05458/) (2022)
- [Low-complexity Overfitted Neural Image Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12706/) (2023)
- [Cool-chic video: Learned video coding with 800 parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03179/) (2024)
- [RQAT-INR: Improved Implicit Neural Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03028/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent implicit neural representation (INR)-based image compression methods have shown competitive performance by overfitting image-specific latent codes. However, they remain inferior to end-to-end (E2E) compression approaches due to the absence of expressive latent representations. On the other hand, E2E methods rely on transmitting latent codes and requiring complex entropy models, leading to increased decoding complexity. Inspired by the normalization strategy in E2E codecs where latents are transformed into Gaussian noise to demonstrate the removal of spatial redundancy, we explore the inverse direction: generating latents directly from Gaussian noise. In this paper, we propose a novel image compression paradigm that reconstructs image-specific latents from a multi-scale Gaussian noise tensor, deterministically generated using a shared random seed. A Gaussian Parameter Prediction (GPP) module estimates the distribution parameters, enabling one-shot latent generation via reparameterization trick. The predicted latent is then passed through a synthesis network to reconstruct the image. Our method eliminates the need to transmit latent codes while preserving latent-based benefits, achieving competitive rate-distortion performance on Kodak and CLIC dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore Gaussian latent generation for learned image compression.