Compressed Feature Quality Assessment: Dataset and Baselines

The widespread deployment of large models in resource-constrained environments has underscored the need for efficient transmission of intermediate feature representations. In this context, feature coding, which compresses features into compact bitstreams, becomes a critical component for scenarios involving feature transmission, storage, and reuse. However, this compression process introduces inherent semantic degradation that is notoriously difficult to quantify with traditional metrics. To address this, this paper introduces the research problem of Compressed Feature Quality Assessment (CFQA), which seeks to evaluate the semantic fidelity of compressed features. To advance CFQA research, we propose the first benchmark dataset, comprising 300 original features and 12000 compressed features derived from three vision tasks and four feature codecs. Task-specific performance drops are provided as true semantic distortion for the evaluation of CFQA metrics. We assess the performance of three widely used metrics (MSE, cosine similarity, and Centered Kernel Alignment) in capturing semantic degradation. The results underscore the representativeness of the dataset and highlight the need for more refined metrics capable of addressing the nuances of semantic distortion in compressed features. To facilitate the ongoing development of CFQA research, we release the dataset and all accompanying source code at \href{https://github.com/chansongoal/Compressed-Feature-Quality-Assessment}{https://github.com/chansongoal/Compressed-Feature-Quality-Assessment}. This contribution aims to advance the field and provide a foundational resource for the community to explore CFQA.