arXiv · 2609.18602
PULSE: Unlocking Practical Image Compression on Single-Thread CPU
Abstract
Despite recent progress in learned image compression, existing methods remain computationally expensive on resource-constrained hardware, particularly CPUs. We introduce PULSE, a practical codec that enables (1) low-latency decoding on diverse hardware platforms with an ultra-low-complexity 5.2 kMAC/pixel neural receiver, and (2) efficient bit-exact entropy coding with an integer linear CDF predictor and a meta prior. To recover compression performance under this tight budget, we introduce an agentic evolution process guided by heuristic probes that iteratively improves the architecture through human-LLM collaboration. PULSE decodes a 1080p image in 126 ms on a single CPU thread while achieving compression performance comparable to HM. After perceptual optimization, PULSE competes with larger perceptual codecs like MS-ILLM. Codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/GenCodec/tree/main/PULSE
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Zhaoyang Jia, Tianyu Zhang, Zihan Zheng, Wenxuan Xie, Jiahao Li, Bin Li, Houqiang Li, Yan Lu. 2026-09-16. PULSE: Unlocking Practical Image Compression on Single-Thread CPU. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18602
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