# Adaptive Fused Prior Transfer for Controllable Generative Image Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16817 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16817/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks for Extreme Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02958/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Lossy Compression: The Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07821/) (2019)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [Nonlinear Transform Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03034/) (2020)
- [Conditional Probability Models for Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04260/) (2018)
- [Variable Rate Deep Image Compression With a Conditional Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04802/) (2019)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric Gained Deep Image Compression With Continuous Rate Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02012/) (2020)
- [Multi-Realism Image Compression with a Conditional Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13824/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

At very low bitrates, image compression discards fine textures and local structures, while distortion-oriented reconstruction often produces over-smoothed images. Generative codecs synthesize missing details, but existing codebook-based controllable designs generally rely on single-codebook reconstruction priors. We propose Adaptive Fused Prior Transfer for Controllable Generative Image Compression (AFP-GIC), which transfers an image-adaptive fused prior from a frozen pretrained AdaCode model. Encoder-side prior features guide latent formation, while the decoder predicts a compatible fused prior from the compressed representation and control variables, without transmitting the prior itself. A motivating analysis shows that better decoder-side prior alignment tightens a reconstruction-error upper bound and that the fused-prior family includes single-codebook choices as special cases. A single pretrained model supports five evaluated bitrate operating points. Under the unified benchmark, AFP-GIC achieves 18.1% lower decoder latency and uses 31.10 million (20.5%) fewer inference parameters than DC-VIC. Experiments on Kodak, CLIC2020, and DIV2K show competitive PSNR and SSIM, with the clearest naturalness gains in NIQE scores and very-low-bitrate visual comparisons. Code: https://github.com/yifeipet/AFP_GIC.
