Semantic Rate Distortion and Posterior Design: Compute Constraints, Multimodality, and Strategic Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Akyol, Emrah
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Akyol, Emrah
author_facet Akyol, Emrah
contents We study strategic Gaussian semantic compression under rate and compute constraints, where an encoder and decoder optimize distinct quadratic objectives. A latent Gaussian state generates a task dependent semantic variable, and the decoder best responds via MMSE estimation, reducing the encoder's problem to posterior covariance design under an information rate constraint. We characterize the strategic rate distortion function in direct, remote, and full information regimes, derive semantic waterfilling and rate constrained Gaussian persuasion solutions, and establish Gaussian optimality under misaligned objectives. We further show that architectural compute limits act as implicit rate constraints, yielding exponential improvements in semantic accuracy with model depth and inference time compute, while multimodal observation eliminates the geometric mean penalty inherent to remote encoding. These results provide information theoretic foundations for data and energy efficient AI and offer a principled interpretation of modern multimodal language models as posterior design mechanisms under resource constraints.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic Rate Distortion and Posterior Design: Compute Constraints, Multimodality, and Strategic Inference
Akyol, Emrah
Information Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We study strategic Gaussian semantic compression under rate and compute constraints, where an encoder and decoder optimize distinct quadratic objectives. A latent Gaussian state generates a task dependent semantic variable, and the decoder best responds via MMSE estimation, reducing the encoder's problem to posterior covariance design under an information rate constraint. We characterize the strategic rate distortion function in direct, remote, and full information regimes, derive semantic waterfilling and rate constrained Gaussian persuasion solutions, and establish Gaussian optimality under misaligned objectives. We further show that architectural compute limits act as implicit rate constraints, yielding exponential improvements in semantic accuracy with model depth and inference time compute, while multimodal observation eliminates the geometric mean penalty inherent to remote encoding. These results provide information theoretic foundations for data and energy efficient AI and offer a principled interpretation of modern multimodal language models as posterior design mechanisms under resource constraints.
title Semantic Rate Distortion and Posterior Design: Compute Constraints, Multimodality, and Strategic Inference
topic Information Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03949