Can Language Unlock Better Compression?

## The Human Intuition

- Humans naturally prioritize high-level semantics, describing the "what" before the "how many pixels".
- Text captions provide a concise, meaningful summary, distilling the essence of an image.
- Descriptive text is now abundant and easy to obtain for most images via modern vision-language models.

### A New Paradigm

Leveraging language to sidestep the traditional trade-off between compression and quality.

Dense Pixel Data
Compact Language Tokens
Higher Quality at Lower Bitrates