Disclosed herein are a method, apparatus, and storage medium for image encoding/decoding. Selective compression learning of latent representations for variable-rate image compression is used for the method, apparatus, and storage medium. A selective compression method that partially encodes latent representations in a completely generalized manner for deep-learning-based variable-rate image compression is disclosed in embodiments. The methods of the embodiments adaptively determine essential representation elements for compression at different target quality levels.