# EVOLVE: Efficient Learned Volume Compression with Variable-Rate Encoding on a Cross-Domain Database

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18187/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DVC: An End-to-end Deep Video Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00101/) (2018)
- [SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09540/) (2023)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Channel-wise Autoregressive Entropy Models for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08739/) (2020)
- [Understanding Straight-Through Estimator in Training Activation Quantized Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05662/) (2019)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [Checkerboard Context Model for Efficient Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15306/) (2021)
- [The Well: a Large-Scale Collection of Diverse Physics Simulations for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00568/) (2024)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [Temporal Context Mining for Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13850/) (2021)
- [ContextGS: Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting with Anchor Level Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20721/) (2024)
- [Asymmetric Gained Deep Image Compression With Continuous Rate Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02012/) (2020)
- [On the De-duplication of LAION-2B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12733/) (2023)
- [TTHRESH: Tensor Compression for Multidimensional Visual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05952/) (2018)
- [InSituNet: Deep Image Synthesis for Parameter Space Exploration of Ensemble Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00407/) (2019)
- [SZ3: A Modular Framework for Composing Prediction-Based Error-Bounded Lossy Compressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02925/) (2021)
- [Fast Neural Representations for Direct Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01579/) (2021)
- [DL4SciVis: A State-of-the-Art Survey on Deep Learning for Scientific Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06504/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale scientific simulations generate volumetric data at rates that far outpace advances in storage and network bandwidth, making effective lossy compression increasingly critical. However, conventional compressors often struggle to preserve fine structural details at high compression ratios (CRs), and implicit neural representations (INRs) require costly per-volume optimization and produce models with fixed CRs. To respond, we present EVOLVE, an autoencoder (AE)-based volume-compression framework that targets high CRs for offline compression, with three key contributions. First, we construct a large-scale cross-domain database of 6,376 volumes from 21 scientific simulations, curated via perceptual hashing to ensure diversity, enabling the optimized model to extract features that generalize across volumes within the covered scientific simulation domains. Second, we reexamine the design space of AE-based compressors and incorporate several macro- and micro-designs into a vanilla AE to develop EVOLVE, which substantially improves the expressive power and compression capability. Third, we develop a learnable gain mechanism with a three-stage training strategy to enable variable-rate encoding, allowing a single model to support continuous CR adjustment at inference time. Experiments on multiple unseen scientific simulation datasets demonstrate that EVOLVE achieves substantially higher CRs than conventional compressors at comparable reconstruction quality, while delivering compression speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than INR-based methods, highlighting its promise as a strong alternative for compressing scientific data. The code, model weights, and results are available on our project page at https://evolve-vis.github.io.