{"paper":{"title":"SoftBinary Coding: A New Information-Theoretic Neural Compression Paradigm","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["eess.SP","math.IT"],"primary_cat":"cs.IT","authors_text":"Aaron B. Wagner, Elza Erkip, Ezgi Ozyilkan, Jona Ball\\'e, Sharang M. Sriramu","submitted_at":"2026-06-28T19:46:28Z","abstract_excerpt":"Neural compression is currently dominated by Nonlinear Transform Coding (NTC), which maps data to real-valued latents via continuous transforms. Despite its success, NTC suffers from train-test mismatch due to non-differentiable quantization, a ``smoothness bias\" inherent in continuous transforms that precludes optimality for certain sources, and a loss of ``shaping gain\" due to the complexity of including high-dimensional vector quantization. We propose SoftBinary Coding (SBC), an end-to-end learning paradigm that bypasses these limitations by using a stochastic binary latent space. In the sp"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.29578","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.29578/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}