A Convergent Primal-Dual Algorithm for Computing Rate-Distortion-Perception Functions

Abstract: Recent advances in Rate-Distortion-Perception (RDP) theory highlight the importance of balancing compression level, reconstruction quality, and perceptual fidelity. While previous work has explored numerical approaches to approximate the information RDP function, the lack of theoretical guarantees remains a major limitation, especially in the presence of complex perceptual constraints that introduce non-convexity and computational intractability. Inspired by our previous constrained Blahut-Arimoto algorithm for solving the rate-distortion function, in this paper, we present a new theoretical framework for computing the information RDP function by relaxing the constraint on the reconstruction distribution and replacing it with an alternative optimization approach over the reconstruction distribution itself. This reformulation significantly simplifies the optimization and enables a rigorous proof of convergence. Based on this formulation, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm with provable convergence guarantees. Our analysis establishes, for the first time, a rigorous convergence rate of $O(1/n)$ for the computation of RDP functions. The proposed method not only bridges a key theoretical gap in the existing literature but also achieves competitive empirical performance in representative settings. These results lay the groundwork for more reliable and interpretable optimization in RDP-constrained compression systems. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.