Noise-Regularized Training for Learned Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) is trained almost exclusively on clean images: the only stochastic perturbation in the loop is an additive uniform proxy injected in the latent domain to keep the entropy model differentiable. Outside compression, by contrast, a long line of work - from Tikhonov regularization and contractive autoencoders through denoising score matching and modern diffusion models - has established that Gaussian noise at the input of a network with a clean target acts as a structured probe of the data manifold rather than as data augmentation. Building on this view, we introduce noise-regularized training for LIC: at every training step we add Gaussian noise to the encoder input while keeping the distortion target, the latent uniform proxy, the hyperprior, and the entropy coding pipeline unchanged. The recipe is architecture-agnostic and adds essentially no training or inference overhead. Across backbones and operating regimes it yields consistent BD-Rate gains: -2.60% on a reproduced ELIC and -0.85% / -1.05% / -2.38% on the Base/Medium/Large scales of a variable-rate DMCI codec, with DMCI-Large reaching -22.02% against VTM-22.0. A second-order expansion of the noisy RD loss accounts for these gains: because the noise enters upstream of the analysis transform, it converts the clean RD objective into a structured $O(\sigma^{2})$ regularizer comprising an information-weighted encoder-Jacobian penalty (rate side) and a Frobenius contractive penalty on the end-to-end reconstruction map (distortion side). A finite-difference Lipschitz analysis verifies both predictions: across QPs and an order-of-magnitude sweep of the probe scale, the encoder's local Lipschitz constant drops by ~12% on average and that of the end-to-end codec by ~8%. Code and trained models will be released to facilitate reproducibility.