# PULSE: Unlocking Practical Image Compression on Single-Thread CPU

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18602/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [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)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Learned Image Compression with Mixed Transformer-CNN Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14978/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Spatial-Temporal Entropy Modelling for Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05894/) (2022)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [Multi-Realism Image Compression with a Conditional Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13824/) (2022)
- [Towards Practical Real-Time Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20762/) (2025)
- [MLIC++: Linear Complexity Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15421/) (2023)
- [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)
- [EVC: Towards Real-Time Neural Image Compression with Mask Decay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05071/) (2023)
- [Computationally-Efficient Neural Image Compression with Shallow Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06244/) (2023)
- [Post-Training Quantization for Cross-Platform Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07513/) (2022)
- [CoD-Lite: Real-Time Diffusion-Based Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12525/) (2026)
- [Learning Switchable Priors for Neural Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16586/) (2025)
- [End-to-end optimized image compression with competition of prior distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09172/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent progress in learned image compression, existing methods remain computationally expensive on resource-constrained hardware, particularly CPUs. We introduce PULSE, a practical codec that enables (1) low-latency decoding on diverse hardware platforms with an ultra-low-complexity 5.2 kMAC/pixel neural receiver, and (2) efficient bit-exact entropy coding with an integer linear CDF predictor and a meta prior. To recover compression performance under this tight budget, we introduce an agentic evolution process guided by heuristic probes that iteratively improves the architecture through human-LLM collaboration. PULSE decodes a 1080p image in 126 ms on a single CPU thread while achieving compression performance comparable to HM. After perceptual optimization, PULSE competes with larger perceptual codecs like MS-ILLM. Codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/GenCodec/tree/main/PULSE