r/MachineLearning - [D] Learnable image loss - what are the approaches?

Lots of papers will use VGG features as a reconstruction loss (often calling this the'perceptual loss') and find that this pretty much always works better than a pixelwise loss (with exceptions perhaps for things like VQ-VAE which already have high sharper quality on their own). The downside of this approach is that you need a pretrained classifier/discriminative model.