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arXiv · 2504.19913

Lossy Source Coding with Focal Loss

Alex Dytso·Martina Cardone
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Abstract

Focal loss has recently gained significant popularity, particularly in tasks like object detection where it helps to address class imbalance by focusing more on hard-to-classify examples. This work proposes the focal loss as a distortion measure for lossy source coding. The paper provides single-shot converse and achievability bounds. These bounds are then used to characterize the distortion-rate trade-off in the infinite blocklength, which is shown to be the same as that for the log loss case. In the non-asymptotic case, the difference between focal loss and log loss is illustrated through a series of simulations.

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Alex Dytso, Martina Cardone. 2025-04-28. Lossy Source Coding with Focal Loss. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19913

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