# The Hidden Perception Constraint in Task-Aware Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35684 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35684/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Lossy Compression: The Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07821/) (2019)
- [Universal Rate-Distortion-Perception Representations for Lossy Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10311/) (2021)
- [A coding theorem for the rate-distortion-perception function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13662/) (2021)
- [The Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff: The Role of Common Randomness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04147/) (2022)
- [A Rate-Distortion Framework for Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13100/) (2025)
- [The Rate-Distortion-Deception Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25997/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent advancements of neural compressors, explicitly incorporating perception constraints into the design of compression schemes has gained significant attention. Traditionally, these perception constraints ensure that the distribution of the reconstruction does not significantly deviate from the distribution of the source, thus attesting to the perceptual quality of the reconstruction. In this work, we uncover several perception constraints that are naturally present in task-aware compression. In particular, we consider a problem where the primary task is reconstruction and the secondary task is classification (i.e., a statistical test). We study this problem at varying levels of domain information available to us and discuss how to utilize the naturally emerging perception constraints to design rate-minimal compression schemes that also maximize the utility of our secondary task. We show that in this setting, if the decision boundaries of the classifier are ill-defined (mismatch) for our source distribution, then matching onto a target distribution enhances our classification accuracy.