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Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · August 17, 2026
Posted before peer review. The findings may change or fail to hold.
UniTAC is a proposed learned image codec that aims to serve multiple downstream tasks without retraining by using runtime-injected task importance vectors. The method is described theoretically and demonstrated on a single localized task, achieving 91.4% accuracy at 0.034 bpp—1.9 percentage points below a task-specific codec and 14.5 percentage points above a universal codec—but lacks peer review and independent validation.
Preprint. Intervention: UniTAC codec: a learned image encoder–decoder with Vision Transformer backbone, trained on a family of weighted per-component importance vectors derived from downstream task gradients, re-targeted at runtime via low-overhead side informati…. Compared with: Task-specific codec and universal codecs.
UniTAC achieves 91.4% accuracy on a localized task at 0.034 bpp Task-specific codec baseline reaches 93.3% accuracy on the same task Universal codec baseline achieves 76.9% accuracy on the same task
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This is an unrefereed arXiv preprint describing a novel machine learning method for image compression; it lacks peer review and clinical or regulatory validation.
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Physical AI systems such as autonomous vehicles and robots rely on timely exchange of high-dimensional sensory signals under tight bandwidth, latency, and energy budgets. Because the task driving downstream decisions evolves over time, a task-specific codec is brittle and retraining one per task is infeasible in the field. We propose UniTAC, a single learned image codec spanning universal (task-agnostic) to task-specialized operation, re-targeted at runtime without retraining. The task is abstracted as a per-component importance vector, derived, e.g., from gradient attribution of any downstream model, and transmitted as low-overhead side information that conditions both encoder and decoder. Trained once over a broad, randomized family of such vectors against weighted-reconstruction distortion, UniTAC keeps a fixed backbone and a single human-viewable reconstruction whose fidelity is steered to the active task by swapping the injected vector. We analyze the underlying weighted rate-distortion problem, characterizing when a diagonal weighted distortion is task-consistent and how weights relate to task sensitivity. Guided by this, we design a Vision Transformer (ViT) codec whose token-level conditioning natively realizes this weight-driven code. On a localized task at 0.034 bpp, a single UniTAC model reaches 91.4% accuracy, only 1.9% below a task-based codec (93.3%) and above universal codecs (76.9%).
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