Vector-quantization based image compression has achieved strong rate--distortion performance, yet most of them still produce a separate compressed representation for each target bitrate. Such variable-rate behavior allows one model to operate at multiple rates, but it does not necessarily provide a progressive bitstream whose prefixes are themselves decodable and can be refined by appending additional bits.

We propose Tree-VQ, a progressive tree-structured vector quantization framework for learned image compression. Tree-VQ organizes discrete codewords as a hierarchical binary tree and represents each latent token by a routed root-to-leaf path.

Crucially, every prefix of this path corresponds to a valid quantized representation, so shallow internal nodes serve as coarse reconstruction codes and deeper nodes provide successive refinements. This allows a compressed image to be decoded from an early prefix and progressively improved as more branch symbols are received, rather than being re-encoded for different target rates.

To make this structure practical for compression, we introduce a prefix-compatible tree entropy model that codes progressive continuation decisions and routed branch refinements using only causally available decoded contexts. We further use rate-aware refinement scheduling to decide which spatial blocks should receive additional tree bits under a given prefix budget, and hierarchical prefix supervision to ensure that internal nodes are directly decodable at low rates.

Experiments show that Tree-VQ achieves a superior performance--efficiency trade-off, delivering the best perceptual compression results with much fewer parameters and lower latency than competing methods.