Discovering shared interpretable operations in image compression autoencoders

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of deep learning for applications such as image compression, improvements in the rate-distortion trade-off have been achieved at the cost of increasingly larger and more opaque ''black-box'' models. Autoencoders are among the most widely used architectures for this task; however, without a clear understanding of their internal behavior, these models tend to grow in complexity to achieve more performance gains. In this paper, we investigate whether universal behaviors can be detected from the internal operations of bias-free autoencoders through Jacobian analysis. If such behaviors exist, they may be extracted to design low-complexity image compression models inspired by high-complexity deep learning architectures.