Yuanchao Bai, Yifan Zhao, Kai Wang +5eess.IV cs.CV
Lossless compression of volumetric medical images is of paramount importance for clinical and research applications where data fidelity is essential. Traditional compression methods are often limited in efficiency due to rigid, handcrafted models. Conversely, deep neural network (DNN)-based compression methods, while effective, demand substantial computational resources, hindering deployment in resource-constrained settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel tri-plane context tree (TCT)-based method for lossless volumetric medical image compression that delivers high performance without relying on DNNs or external training data. To exploit intra-slice and inter-slice redundancies, we introduce a compact tri-plane context representation that decomposes complex 3D context modeling into efficient 2D modeling on three orthogonal planes. By integrating this representation with a context tree framework, we develop an input-specific TCT model employing an adaptive binary tree structure. At each tree node, the model dynamically selects from a suite of tri-plane based predictors and contextual feature extractors, enabling data-adaptive context modeling tailored to local structural characteristics. Instead of offline training, we sample a subset of the input volume to learn the TCT model by optimizing the minimum description length (MDL) through iterative construction and pruning. With the learned TCT model, each pixel retrieves its corresponding context, computes the prediction residual using the predictor dictated by the context, and performs entropy encoding based on the associated histograms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves compression performance on par with recent DNN-based methods on multiple datasets, while maintaining low computational cost and fast coding speeds, making it highly applicable in practice.
Angelo Nardone, Paolo Ferraginacs.CL cs.AI cs.IT cs.LG
We study the problem of lossless text compression, motivated by the rapid growth in the collection and storage of digital textual data - including plain text, source code, and structured formats such as XML - and by recent advances in neural language model-based compression. In particular, recent LLM-based approaches, whether built on symbol-ranking pipelines or paired with a statistical compressor, have demonstrated compression ratios significantly superior to general-purpose compressors such as zstd, gzip, or bzip on text and code. However, these neural approaches suffer from severe throughput limitations, making them not yet practically usable. For the first time in the context of lossless neural text compression, we introduce Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) as an alternative inference paradigm to autoregressive LLM-based approaches. We argue that replacing autoregressive LLMs with DLMs within the same compression framework could overcome the throughput bottleneck caused by their one-symbol-per-step limitation. However, achieving these improvements requires addressing algorithmic challenges introduced by applying DLMs to lossless compression, where the architecture allows the number and positions of symbols encoded at each forward pass to be decided independently. We design efficient and effective strategies to solve these challenges and evaluate them experimentally against LLM-based and general-purpose compressors on enwik8, a well-established textual benchmark. Our results show that the newly proposed DLM-based framework advances the state of the art in lossless text compression. Moreover, as DLMs are still a relatively young paradigm, recent advances toward increasingly capable and efficient models suggest substantial room for further improvements.
Model checkpoints are growing in both number and size, which makes archival, transfer, and deployment increasingly costly. General-purpose compressors can reduce storage requirements but ignore tensor structure, whereas existing tensor-specific compressors rely on fixed and format-specific pipelines. We present Brevis, which formulates lossless tensor compression as program synthesis. We design a typed domain-specific language (DSL) that captures recurring tensor structures, such as repeated regions and floating-point fields, through a set of reversible operators. Given a tensor, Brevis synthesizes a self-contained DSL program that reconstructs it bit-exactly. A checkpoint-specific production prior, learned from a small representative sample of tensors, guides a bounded A* search to synthesize compact programs, which can later be executed directly for bit-exact decompression. On 10 public checkpoints spanning language, audio, and image generation models, Brevis reduces 2.13 TB of checkpoint data to 1.41 TB, a 33.93% storage reduction. It produces archives up to 30.87% smaller than those of four general-purpose compressors, including zstd and gzip, and smaller archives than the tensor-specific compressors ZipNN and DFloat11. Under a practical concurrency configuration, Brevis achieves 3.60 GB/s compression and 6.61 GB/s decompression while preserving every source byte.
We study the problem of lossless compression of source code, motivated by the storage demands of large-scale software archives, such as Software Heritage (https://www.softwareheritage.org/). General-purpose compressors (e.g., zstd, bzip2) offer a good trade-off between compression ratio and speed, but fail to exploit all special regularities inherent in source code. Recent approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) within Shannon's symbol-ranking framework, relying on a scheme in which the predicted rank can grow arbitrarily. While effective at reducing space, this setting incurs significant throughput degradation, and leaves open the question whether it is necessary to explicitly encode all ranks. In this work, we introduce LLM-based compressors deploying two novel symbol-ranking variants that bound predictions to the top-$T$ ranks ($T=1$ or $63$), with out-of-threshold symbols stored as exceptions and compressed jointly with the rank stream via general-purpose compressors. We conduct the first large-scale evaluation of LLM-based source code compression across 30 LLMs, including general-domain, code-specialized, and quantized models. Our $T$-bounded approach outperforms prior LLM-based compressors both in compression ratio (up to 37% relative improvement) and compression throughput (40% faster). Compared to general-purpose compressors (e.g., zstd, bzip2), we obtain up to 82% relative compression gain but at a lower speed, thus offering a new trade-off point in the compression-speed spectrum. We also show that these gains are stronger on source code than on natural language, suggesting an interesting indication, namely that source code exposes regularities captured by LLMs but missed by general-purpose exact-match-based compressors. We conclude by commenting on open problems that offer theoretical and practical avenues of research.
Kaiyuan Tang, Daniel Burke, Chaoli Wangcs.CV cs.GR
Implicit neural representation (INR) methods provide continuous coordinate-to-value mappings and integrate naturally with direct volume rendering, making them attractive for representing volumetric data. However, existing INR-based approaches for volumetric data are inherently lossy, and even small reconstruction errors can propagate through rendering and downstream analysis. In this work, we explore Lossless-INR, a lossless INR framework for 3D scientific volumetric data based on bit-plane decomposition. By decomposing each voxel value into binary bit-planes, we reformulate reconstruction as per-bit binary classification, so that exact recovery reduces to predicting every bit correctly. To make this optimization tractable while keeping the representation compact, we combine an octree block-partitioning strategy that adaptively subdivides complex regions with a ternary feature-grid network whose grid entries are parameterized by a ternary set of values. Experiments on diverse volumetric datasets show that this design can achieve zero bit-error rate and bit-exact reconstruction, enabling faithful rendering and downstream analysis with a compact representation. The code is available at https://github.com/TouKaienn/Lossless-INR.
Large language model (LLM)-based lossless image compression methods typically represent pixel data through the native text interface of a pretrained model, converting pixel values into token sequences that the LLM processes through its vocabulary head. This design shows that pretrained language models can provide probability estimates for image coding, but it also couples compression to tokenizer behavior, vocabulary-specific numeric tokens, and model-family-specific adaptation. In this paper, we present LUMI (LLM-based Unified Model-agnostic lossless Image compression), a tokenizer-agnostic framework for lossless RGB image compression with frozen LLM backbones. LUMI replaces pixel-as-text tokenization with a pixel embedding module that maps raw intensity and channel information into the continuous embedding space of the LLM. It further introduces intra-patch position encoding to retain two-dimensional spatial structure after flattening, and uses a 256-way prediction head to produce probabilities over the native pixel alphabet. Only the pixel embedding, position encoding, soft-prefix parameters, and prediction head are trained, while the LLM backbone remains fixed. Experiments on natural, medical, and remote-sensing image benchmarks with LLaMA, Qwen, and Gemma backbones show that LUMI provides a unified interface across tokenizer families, achieves competitive compression rates, and improves cross-domain robustness over tokenizer-based LLM compression baselines. These results formulate LLM-based lossless image compression as pixel-space adaptation of frozen foundation models rather than tokenizer-specific language-symbol modeling.
Wenxiang Lin, Xinglin Pan, Ruibo Fan +2cs.DC cs.CL
Communication has emerged as a critical bottleneck in the distributed training of large language models (LLMs). While numerous approaches have been proposed to reduce communication overhead, the potential of lossless compression has remained largely underexplored since compression and decompression typically consume larger overheads than the benefits of reduced communication traffic. We observe that the communication data, including activations, gradients and parameters, during training often follows a near-Gaussian distribution, which is a key feature for data compression. Thus, we introduce ZipCCL, a lossless compressed communication library of collectives for LLM training. ZipCCL is equipped with our novel techniques: (1) theoretically grounded exponent coding that exploits the Gaussian distribution of LLM tensors to accelerate compression without expensive online statistics, (2) GPU-optimized compression and decompression kernels that carefully design memory access patterns and pipeline using communication-aware data layout, and (3) adaptive communication strategies that dynamically switch collective operations based on workload patterns and system characteristics. Evaluated on a 64-GPU cluster using both mixture-of-experts and dense transformer models, ZipCCL reduces communication time by up to 1.35$\times$ and achieves end-to-end training speedups of up to 1.18$\times$ without any impact on model quality.