Learn to overfit better: finding the important parameters for learned image compression

For most machine learning systems, overfitting is an undesired behavior. However, overfitting a model to a test image or a video at inference time is a favorable and effective technique to improve the coding efficiency of learning-based image and video codecs. At the encoding stage, one or more neural networks that are part of the codec are finetuned using the input image or video to achieve a better coding performance. The encoder en-codes the input content into a content bitstream. If the finetuned neural network is part (also) of the decoder, the encoder signals the weight update of the finetuned model to the decoder along with the content bitstream. At the decoding stage, the decoder first updates its neural network model according to the received weight update, and then proceeds with decoding the content bitstream. Since a neural network contains a large number of parameters, compressing the weight update is critical to reducing bitrate overhead. In this paper, we propose learning-based methods to find the important parameters to be overfitted, in terms of rate-distortion performance. Based on simple distribution models for variables in the weight update, we derive two objective functions. By optimizing the proposed objective functions, the importance scores of the parameters can be calculated and the important parameters can be determined. Our experiments on lossless image compression codec show that the proposed method significantly outperforms a prior-art method where overfitted parameters were selected based on heuristics. Furthermore, our technique improved the compression performance of the state-of-the-art lossless image compression codec by 0.1 bit per pixel.