Leveraging Second-Order Curvature for Efficient Learned Image Compression: Theory and Empirical Evidence
Training learned image compression (LIC) models entails navigating a challenging optimization landscape defined by the fundamental trade-off between rate and distortion. Standard first-order optimizers, such as SGD and Adam, struggle with emph{gradient conflicts} arising from competing objectives, leading to slow convergence and suboptimal rate-distortion performance. In this work, we demonstrate that a simple utilization of a second-order quasi-Newton optimizer, textbf{SOAP}, dramatically improves both training efficiency and final performance across diverse LICs. Our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that […]