ICLR2026
Cross-Domain Lossy Compression via Rate- and Classification-Constrained Optimal Transport
Nam Nguyen, Thinh Nguyen, Bella Bose
Abstract
We study cross-domain lossy compression, where the encoder observes a degraded source while the decoder reconstructs samples from a distinct target distribution. The problem is formulated as constrained optimal transport with two constraints on compression rate and classification loss. With shared common randomness, the one-shot setting reduces to a deterministic transport plan, and we derive closed-form distortion-rate-classification (DRC) and rate-distortionclassification (RDC) tradeoffs for Bernoulli sources under Hamming distortion. In the asymptotic regime, we establish analytic DRC/RDC expressions for Gaussian models under mean-squared error. The framework is further extended to incorporate perception divergences (Kullback-Leibler and squared Wasserstein), yielding closed-form distortion-rate-perception-classification (DRPC) functions. To validate the theory, we develop deep end-to-end compression models for superresolution (MNIST), denoising (SVHN, CIFAR-10, ImageNet, KODAK), and inpainting (SVHN) problems, demonstrating the consistency between the theoretical results and empirical performance. p U,X,Y ∈Q(p X ,p Y ) E[d(X, Y )]