CALICE: Continuous bitrate control with Adapted LIC modEl

Learned image compression (LIC) has drawn much attention recently as it outperforms standardized codecs in rate-distortion (RD) efficiency. However, a LIC model is typically trained for a specific RD trade-off, and achieving a different target rate requires retraining the model and storing the weights as a whole, limiting the practical applicability of LIC. In this paper, we introduce CALICE, a framework for achieving continuous bitrate control by plugging into a pre-trained LIC model a set of modular adapters. Unlike similar methods that require a distinct set of adapters for each target rate, our method achieves continuous bitrate control by modulating a single set of adapters via a scalar parameter \(α\) , with a total overhead of less than \(0.35%\) of the parameters of the LIC model. This design enables efficient support for multiple distortion objectives by learning lightweight, distortion-aware adapters. We also extend our strategy beyond rate control, demonstrating its ability to provide fine-grained adaptation of perceptual quality along the distortion-perception trade-off. To our knowledge, this is the first method that jointly addresses rate and perceptual control using a unified, low-cost strategy. We publicly released the code at https://github.com/EIDOSLAB/CALICE .