There is definitely work out there that deals directly in dct blocks from jpeg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11503 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11503 https://arxi

There is definitely work out there that deals directly in dct blocks from jpeg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11503 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11503 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09110 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09110 With generative ai they tend to have a learned compressed representation instead (VAE)