Core Concepts
Information lattice learning is a powerful framework for learning hierarchical semantic abstractions from data and enabling semantically-meaningful lossy and lossless compression.
Abstract
The paper argues that information lattice learning (ILL) is a natural approach for semantic compression, as it can learn hierarchical semantic abstractions in a human-interpretable manner.
Key highlights:
- Information elements and information lattices provide a mathematical formulation of propositions and their semantic relationships, enabling a principled treatment of semantic compression.
- ILL can learn these information lattices from data, matching compression schemes to complicated source statistics for improved performance.
- The group-theoretic foundations of information lattices enable exponential rate savings in lossless and lossy compression under permutation group invariance, as well as optimal progressive transmission.
- Lossy semantic compression can be viewed as an abstraction process, where projecting down the learned information lattice yields hierarchical semantic compressions.
- Successive refinement of semantic information can be achieved optimally using group source codes on the information lattice structure, without any rate loss.
The paper provides a comprehensive and detailed treatment of how ILL can be leveraged for semantic compression, with clear connections to information theory and group theory.
Quotes
"Information element in the lattice theory of information is a natural mathematical formulation of proposition in semantics, and accordingly, information lattices are natural for foundational work in the emerging area of semantic communication."
"Given the group-theoretic foundations of information lattices, one can remember the exponential rate savings that are possible in lossless and lossy data compression under permutation group invariance (corresponding to the semantics of scientific data and other similar sources)."
"Formalizing distortion using a lattice-based distance measure for partitions, we show the same kind of results for more general semantic compression with information lattice learning."