Discrete Lossy Gray–Wyner Revisited: Second-Order Asymptotics, Large and Moderate Deviations

In this paper, we revisit the discrete lossy Gray-Wyner problem. In particular, we derive its optimal second-order coding rate region, its error exponent (reliability function), and its moderate deviations constant under mild conditions on the source. To obtain the second-order asymptotics, we extend some ideas from Watanabe’s work. In particular, we leverage the properties of an appropriate generalization of the conditional distortion-tilted information density, which was first introduced by Kostina and Verdú. The converse part uses a perturbation argument by Gu and Effros in their strong converse proof of the discrete Gray–Wyner problem. The achievability part uses two novel elements: 1) a generalization of various type covering lemmas and 2) the uniform continuity of the conditional rate-distortion function in both the source (joint) distribution and the distortion level. To obtain the error exponent, for the achievability part, we use the same generalized type covering lemma, and for the converse, we use the strong converse together with a change-of-measure technique. Finally, to obtain the moderate deviations constant, we apply the moderate deviations theorem to probabilities defined in terms of information spectrum quantities.