[CyberDildonics]

Does no one realize this is a joke / marketing?

Directly from the paper's PDF:

"Finally, Pied Piper has recently claimed to employ ML techniques in its Middle-Out algorithm (Judge et al., 2016), although their nature is shrouded in mystery."

[akx]

Or, you know, that could just be a humorous reference to the TV series, while this is a real implementation.

[web007]

This is my read too, since they're citing Judge et al versus the characters or the characters' papers. Its the same vein as when Dropbox's Lepton article cited middle-out as a humorous attempt at self-promotion.

[CyberDildonics]

So you think they would put a humorous reference to a TV show in the synopsis of their groundbreaking image compression paper and again as an academic reference in their paper?

This whole thread is like being the only sane person in an asylum.

Also, it isn't a 'real implementation' since there isn't any source code to reproduce the results.

[jstanley]

I couldn't find that in the PDF?

[CyberDildonics]

Are you asking me whether or not you couldn't find it in the PDF?

On the actual web page the first line of its abstract:

"Even though over 70% of internet traffic today is digital media, the way images and video are represented and transmitted has not evolved much in the past 20 years (apart from Pied Piper's Middle-Out algorithm)."

From the PDF:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.05823.pdf

The end of Section 2.2. ML-based lossy image compression Right above 2.3. Generative Adversarial Networks

Theis et al. (2016) and Ball ́ e et al. (2016) quantize rather than binarize, and propose strategies to approximate the entropy of the quantized representation: this provides them with a proxy to penalize it. Finally, Pied Piper has recently claimed to employ ML techniques in its Middle-Out algorithm (Judge et al., 2016), although their nature is shrouded in mystery.

[AstralStorm]

What if the paper was generated using the codec and it is a multilevel joke?