The evolution of lossy compression

TL;DR

This paper explores how organisms balance information accuracy and resource costs in complex environments, revealing regimes of perceptual fidelity and evolutionary pressures that optimize internal representations.

Contribution

It introduces a framework based on rate-distortion theory to explain the evolution of perceptual systems and identifies regimes of fidelity with implications for biological adaptation.

Findings

Perceptual costs scale logarithmically with environmental complexity in high-fidelity regimes.

Perceptual costs are independent of environment in low-fidelity regimes.

Evolution favors organisms at the threshold between these regimes to optimize information processing.

Abstract

In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to memory and processing. Rate-distortion theory shows that, when errors are allowed, remarkably efficient internal representations can be found by biologically-plausible hill-climbing mechanisms. We identify two regimes: a high-fidelity regime where perceptual costs scale logarithmically with environmental complexity, and a low-fidelity regime where perceptual costs are, remarkably, independent of the environment. When environmental complexity is rising, Darwinian evolution should drive organisms to the threshold between the high- and low-fidelity regimes. Organisms that code efficiently will find themselves able to make, just barely, the most subtle distinctions in their environment.