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Oral
Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation
George Papamakarios · Iain Murray · Theo Pavlakou

Thu Dec 07 11:10 AM -- 11:25 AM (PST) @ Hall C
in Deep Learning, Algorithms »

Autoregressive models are among the best performing neural density estimators. We describe an approach for increasing the flexibility of an autoregressive model, based on modelling the random numbers that the model uses internally when generating data. By constructing a stack of autoregressive models, each modelling the random numbers of the next model in the stack, we obtain a type of normalizing flow suitable for density estimation, which we call Masked Autoregressive Flow. This type of flow is closely related to Inverse Autoregressive Flow and is a generalization of Real NVP. Masked Autoregressive Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance in a range of general-purpose density estimation tasks.

Author Information

George Papamakarios (University of Edinburgh)
Iain Murray (University of Edinburgh)

Iain Murray is a SICSA Lecturer in Machine Learning at the University of Edinburgh. Iain was introduced to machine learning by David MacKay and Zoubin Ghahramani, both previous NIPS tutorial speakers. He obtained his PhD in 2007 from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. His thesis on Monte Carlo methods received an honourable mention for the ISBA Savage Award. He was a commonwealth fellow in Machine Learning at the University of Toronto, before moving to Edinburgh in 2010. Iain's research interests include building flexible probabilistic models of data, and probabilistic inference from indirect and uncertain observations. Iain is passionate about teaching. He has lectured at several Summer schools, is listed in the top 15 authors on videolectures.net, and was awarded the EUSA Van Heyningen Award for Teaching in Science and Engineering in 2015.

Theo Pavlakou (The University of Edinburgh)

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