Stochastic encoders have been used in rate-distortion theory and neural compression because they can be easier to handle. However, in performance comparisons with deterministic encoders they often do worse, suggesting that noise in the encoding process may generally be a bad idea. It is poorly understood if and when stochastic encoders do better than deterministic encoders. In this paper we provide one illustrative example which shows that stochastic encoders can significantly outperform the best deterministic encoders. Our toy example suggests that stochastic encoders may be particularly useful in the regime of "perfect perceptual quality".

翻译：但是,在与确定性编码器进行性能比较时,它们往往做得更差,这表明编码过程中的噪音一般可能是一个坏主意。人们不太了解这些编码器是否和何时比确定性编码器做得更好。本文提供了一个示例,表明随机性编码器可以大大超过最佳确定性编码器。我们的玩具实例表明,在“精准概念质量”制度下,随机性编码器可能特别有用。