UniTAC: Universal Task-Aware Compression via Weighted Distortion Measures

Abstract:Physical AI systems such as autonomous vehicles and robots rely on timely exchange of high-dimensional sensory signals under tight bandwidth, latency, and energy budgets. Because the task driving downstream decisions evolves over time, a task-specific codec is brittle and retraining one per task is infeasible in the field. We propose UniTAC, a single learned image codec spanning universal (task-agnostic) to task-specialized operation, re-targeted at runtime without retraining. The task is abstracted as a per-component importance vector, derived, e.g., from gradient attribution of any downstream model, and transmitted as low-overhead side information that conditions both encoder and decoder. Trained once over a broad, randomized family of such vectors against weighted-reconstruction distortion, UniTAC keeps a fixed backbone and a single human-viewable reconstruction whose fidelity is steered to the active task by swapping the injected vector. We analyze the underlying weighted rate-distortion problem, characterizing when a diagonal weighted distortion is task-consistent and how weights relate to task sensitivity. Guided by this, we design a Vision Transformer (ViT) codec whose token-level conditioning natively realizes this weight-driven code. On a localized task at 0.034 bpp, a single UniTAC model reaches 91.4% accuracy, only 1.9% below a task-based codec (93.3%) and above universal codecs (76.9%).

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Theory (cs.IT); Multimedia (cs.MM)

arXiv:2608.16696 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.16696v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.16696 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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