A unified approach to source and message compression

Understand

We study the problem of source and message compression in the one-shot setting for the point-to-point and multi-party scenarios (with and without side information).

• We derive achievability results for these tasks in a unified manner, using the techniques of convex-split, which was introduced in [Anshu,Devabathini and Jain 2014] and position-based decoding introduced in [Anshu, Jain and Warsi 2017], which in turn uses hypothesis testing between distributions.
• These results are in terms of smooth max divergence and smooth hypothesis testing divergence.
• As a by-product of the tasks studied in this work, we obtain several known source compression results (originally studied in the asymptotic and i.i.d.