# Training-Free Continuous Bitrate Control for Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00158/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 6 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [Image Coding for Machines with Edge Information Learning Using Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04173/) (2024)
- [Explicit Residual-Based Scalable Image Coding for Humans and Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19297/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Adaptive Quantization for Variable Rate Image Coding for Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05836/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continuous variable-rate compression is highly demanded in real-world applications, but remains underexplored in scalable image coding for humans and machines. In this paper, we propose a training-free variable-rate scalable image coding framework. By adaptively adjusting quantization step sizes based on predicted scale values, the proposed method enables independent and continuous bitrate control for the machine and enhancement layers while preserving important latent information in each layer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and highlight the importance of bitrate allocation between the two layers.