Great work. Thank you for making it so accessible online and sharing it on HN!

The first thought I had, after looking at some of the examples, is that it should be fairly trivial to train or finetune the compression network to hallucinate missing detail with "BPG-style" or "JPG-style" smoothing artifacts by feeding compressed images as "real" samples to the adversarial network during training/finetuning.

I wonder if doing that would make it possible to achieve even greater compression with loss of detail that is indistinguishable from traditional compression methods and therefore still acceptable to the human eye.