Optimizing Fidelity-Perception Tradeoff via Large Vision-Language Model Prior for Image Compression

Current neural image compression (NIC) methods primarily focus on signal fidelity optimization. While perceptually optimized codecs can generate decoded images that better align with human visual preferences at equivalent bitrates, they raise authenticity concerns due to potential deviations from the original content. Therefore, achieving controllable decoding is crucial in various applications. This study presents a novel plug-and-play framework that leverages large vision-language model (LVLM) priors to balance fidelity and perception for existing NICs. Our approach consists of two key components: a scalable Low-Rank Adaptation scheme to controllably enhance the semantics of initially decoded images, and a two-stage agent-assisted decoding strategy with vision-language priors utilization. Specifically, the first stage extracts textual semantic information from an LVLM using decoded images enhanced by flexible fidelity-perception decoding, while the second stage effectively integrates semantic priors from LVLMs, further mitigating decoding semantic uncertainty and achieving higher-quality decoding. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method enables off-the-shelf NICs to achieve flexible control between optimal perceptual quality and signal fidelity.