Entropy-Coded MS-VQ-VAE with Learned Priors for Ultra-Low Bitrate Video Compression

arXiv:2607.02562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned video codecs based on continuous latent representations struggle to operate reliably below 0.1 bits per pixel~(bpp): without a differentiable rate signal, Lagrangian optimisation cannot effectively trade reconstruction quality for bitrate at extreme compression ratios. We demonstrate that discrete latent representations sidestep this limitation entirely. In a vector-quantized~(VQ) codec, the codebook size~$K$ imposes a hard information ceil...