# Rethinking Generative Image Compression at Extremely Low Bitrates

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39315/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [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)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [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)
- [DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05741/) (2025)
- [Towards image compression with perfect realism at ultra-low bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10325/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Effective Tokenizers for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03444/) (2025)
- [Lossy Compression with Gaussian Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08889/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative image compression produces visually plausible reconstructions at low bitrates, yet their behavior as the rate approaches zero remains largely unexplored. When pushed below normal operating rates, representative codecs undergo semantic collapse: rather than gracefully losing source-specific detail, they produce malformed or unrecognizable content. Our analysis identifies two factors. As the bitrate decreases, reconstruction losses increasingly conflict with semantic objectives on gradients and visual results, while pixel-space and reconstruction-oriented VAE diffusion models become less efficient on semantic preservation. Guided by these findings, we introduce RAE-CoD, a compression-oriented diffusion (CoD) built in a representation autoencoder (RAE) space with direct alignment between compressed and source representations, preserving recognizable, naturally structured content for a 256×256 image with as few as 16 bits. We evaluate this framework using five vision foundation models (VFM) and a blinded vision-language model protocol. On MSCOCO-30K, RAE-CoD stands out from all evaluation. At 0.001-0.008 bpp, it reduces relative VFM feature MSE and Fr'echet Distance ratio by at least 25.7% and 69.1% over the best competitors. Meanwhile, semantic recognizability and quality of the reconstructions remain nearly constant while source consistency falls smoothly, replacing abrupt semantic collapse with a graceful transition toward unconditional generation. Code will be released at https://github.com/LuizScarlet/RAE-CoD.