# Progressive Learned Image Compression for Machine Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [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)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [CompressAI: a PyTorch library and evaluation platform for end-to-end compression research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03029/) (2020)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Predicting with Confidence on Unseen Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03315/) (2021)
- [Don't Shake the Wheel: Momentum-Aware Planning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03125/) (2025)
- [Transformer-based Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06707/) (2021)
- [Part-based Pseudo Label Refinement for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14675/) (2022)
- [Joint Global and Local Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04487/) (2021)
- [Image coding for machines: an end-to-end learned approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09993/) (2021)
- [Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13925/) (2023)
- [TransTIC: Transferring Transformer-based Image Compression from Human Perception to Machine Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05085/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Coarse-to-Fine: Progressive Image Compression for Semantically Hierarchical Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08266/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in learned image codecs have extended from human perception toward machine perception However, progressive image compression with fine granular scalability (FGS)-which enables decoding a single bitstream at multiple quality levels-remains unexplored for machine-oriented codecs. In this work, we propose PICM-Net, a progressive learned image compression codec for machine perception built on trit-plane coding. Starting from a human-oriented codec, we adapt it for machine perception via a spatial-frequency modulation adapter (SFMA), a hyper-synthesis low-rank adapter (HSLoRA), and progressive decoding-aware training, and analyze how task-driven adaptation alters symbol prioritization for progressive transmission. To further support real-world deployment, we introduce an adaptive decoding controller that dynamically determines the necessary decoding level at inference time, requesting additional bits only when the current suitability is insufficient for the desired confidence level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PICM-Net achieves efficient and adaptive progressive transmission while maintaining strong downstream classification performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/kjungwoo03/PICM-Net.