The transmitting side should be able to compare this version to the ground truth and if it diverges too much then it tells the receiving end to fall back to “no

The transmitting side should be able to compare this version to the ground truth and if it diverges too much then it tells the receiving end to fall back to “normal” blocky compression artifacts instead of keeping the eerie one. So long as the face-specific-compression faithfully reproduces the ground truth, it should be fine. In a way it’s similar to voice-specific compression for audio. Knowing what’s transmitted (a head) is information that should be used. I’d love to see one of these algorithms used for other context specific areas where there is much less to “lose”: sports. Compressed streams of a grass pitch with players running after a ball has horrible compression artifacts when the camera pans at low bitrates. But the receiver should know what the pitch looks like where the camera pans - it’s static, and we had it on screen a moment ago!