An Information-Spectrum Approach to Weak Variable-Length Source Coding With Side-Information

This paper studies variable-length (VL) source coding of general sources with side-information. Novel one-shot coding bounds for Slepian-Wolf (SW) coding, which give nonasymptotic tradeoff between the error probability and the codeword length of VL-SW coding, are established. One-shot results are applied to asymptotic analysis, and a general formula for the optimal coding rate achievable by weakly lossless VL-SW coding (i.e., VL-SW coding with vanishing error probability) is derived. Our general formula reveals how the encoder side-information and/or VL coding improve the optimal coding rate in the general setting. In addition, it is shown that if the encoder side-information is useless in weakly lossless VL coding then it is also useless even in the case where the error probability may be positive asymptotically.