A system utilizing a high throughput lossless coding mode for CABAC in HEVC is described. The system may include an electronic device configured to obtain a block of data to be encoded using an arithmetic based encoder; determine whether the block of data is to be encoded using lossless encoding; in response to determining that the block of data is not to be encoded using lossless encoding, use a first Absolute-3 coding technique to encode the block of data; in response to determining that the block of data is to be encoded using lossless encoding, use a second Absolute-3 coding technique to encode the block of data; wherein the second Absolute-3 coding technique is different than the first Absolute-3 coding technique.