  We consider the task of lossy compression of high-dimensional vectors through
quantization. We propose the approach that learns quantization parameters by
minimizing the distortion of scalar products and squared distances between
pairs of points. This is in contrast to previous works that obtain these
parameters through the minimization of the reconstruction error of individual
points. The proposed approach proceeds by finding a linear transformation of
the data that effectively reduces the minimization of the pairwise distortions
to the minimization of individual reconstruction errors. After such
transformation, any of the previously-proposed quantization approaches can be
used. Despite the simplicity of this transformation, the experiments
demonstrate that it achieves considerable reduction of the pairwise distortions
compared to applying quantization directly to the untransformed data.
