This seems so overly complicated, with the RNN learning to do arithmetic coding and image compression all at once. Why not do something like autoencoders to com

This seems so overly complicated, with the RNN learning to do arithmetic coding and image compression all at once. Why not do something like autoencoders to compress the image? Then you need only send a small hidden state. You can compress an image to many fewer bits like that. Then you can clean up the remaining error by sending the smaller Delta, which itself can be compressed, either by the same neural net, or with standard image compression. The idea of using NNs for compression has been around for at least 2 decades. The real issue is that it's ridiculously slow. Performance is a big deal for most applications. It's also not clear how to handle different resolutions or ratios.