By optimizing the rate-distortion-realism trade-off, generative compression
approaches produce detailed, realistic images, even at low bit rates, instead
of the blurry reconstructions produced by rate-distortion optimized models.
However, previous methods do not explicitly control how much detail is
synthesized, which results in a common criticism of these methods: users might
be worried that a misleading reconstruction far from the input image is
generated. In this work, we alleviate these concerns by training a decoder that
can bridge the two regimes and navigate the distortion-realism trade-off. From
a single compressed representation, the receiver can decide to either
reconstruct a low mean squared error reconstruction that is close to the input,
a realistic reconstruction with high perceptual quality, or anything in
between. With our method, we set a new state-of-the-art in distortion-realism,
pushing the frontier of achievable distortion-realism pairs, i.e., our method
achieves better distortions at high realism and better realism at low
distortion than ever before.

通过优化失真、真实感和压缩率之间的平衡，生成式压缩方法可以在低比特率下产生详细，逼真的图像。本文提出了一种新方法，训练了一个解码器，能够在失真 - 真实感平衡中生成高质量的实际效果，创造了最新的 state-of-the-art 技术水平。