README.md

Monte Carlo Bits-Back Coding (McBits)

This repository contains the official implementation for Improving Lossless Compression Rates via Monte Carlo Bits-Back Coding (ICML 2021 Oral).

Setup

Install the conda environment:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate mcbits
pip install -e .

If you update the environment, please also update the environment file:

conda env export --name mcbits | grep -v "^prefix: " > environment.yml

Repo Structure

The McBits implementation are included in the mcbits directory, where the rANS is implemented in mcbits/rans.py and all McBits coders are in mcbits/coders.py.

The code for reproducing our experiments is in the experiments directory. We include the toy experiment (experiments/toy_data), lossless image compression on the EMNIST dataset (experiments/img_emnist), and loessless sequential data compression on pianoroll datasets (experiments/seq_pianoroll). Each includes a README for executing the pipeline and reproducing the results.

Note: the current rANS implementation is not parallelized. The faster parallel implementation based on JAX will be released soon!

Citation

If you find this work relevant to your work, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{ruan2021improving,
  title={Improving Lossless Compression Rates via Monte Carlo Bits-Back Coding},
  author={Ruan, Yangjun and Ullrich, Karen and Severo, Daniel and Townsend, James and Khisti, Ashish and Doucet, Arnaud and Makhzani, Alireza and Maddison, Chris J},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year={2021},
}

Acknowledgement

The rANS implementation is closely based on the note by Fabian Giesen and the bits-back repo.