Estimating the Rate-Distortion Function by Wasserstein Gradient Descent

In the theory of lossy compression, the rate-distortion (R-D) function $R(D)$ describes how much a data source can be compressed (in bit-rate) at any given level of fidelity (distortion). Obtaining $R(D)$ for a given data source establishes the fundamental performance limit for all compression algorithms. We propose a new method to estimate $R(D)$ from the perspective of optimal transport. Unlike the classic Blahut--Arimoto algorithm which fixes the support of the reproduction distribution in advance, our Wasserstein gradient descent algorithm learns the support of the optimal reproduction distribution by moving particles. We prove its local convergence and analyze the sample complexity of our R-D estimator based on a connection to entropic optimal transport. Experimentally, we obtain comparable or tighter bounds than state-of-the-art neural network methods on low-rate sources while requiring considerably less tuning and computation effort. We also highlight a connection to maximum-likelihood deconvolution and introduce a new class of sources that can be used as test cases with known solutions to the R-D problem.

Convergence Rates for Regularized Optimal Transport via Quantization

We study the convergence of divergence-regularized optimal transport as the regularization parameter vanishes. Sharp rates for general divergences including relative entropy or $L^{p}$ regularization, general transport costs and multi-marginal problems are obtained. A novel methodology using quantization and martingale couplings is suitable for non-compact marginals and achieves, in particular, the sharp leading-order term of entropically regularized 2-Wasserstein distance for all marginals with finite $(2+\delta)$-moment.