Denoising Normalizing Flow

Christian Horvat, Jean-Pascal Pfister

Keywords: Normalizing Flow, Manifold Learning, Density Estimation

Abstract: Normalizing flows (NF) are expressive as well as tractable density estimation methods whenever the support of the density is diffeomorphic to the entire data-space. However, real-world data sets typically live on (or very close to) low-dimensional manifolds thereby challenging the applicability of standard NF on real-world problems. Here we propose a novel method - called Denoising Normalizing Flow (DNF) - that estimates the density on the low-dimensional manifold while learning the manifold as well. The DNF works in 3 steps. First, it inflates the manifold - making it diffeomorphic to the entire data-space. Secondly, it learns an NF on the inflated manifold and finally it learns a denoising mapping - similarly to denoising autoencoders. The DNF relies on a single cost function and does not require to alternate between a density estimation phase and a manifold learning phase - as it is the case with other recent methods. Furthermore, we show that the DNF can learn meaningful low-dimensional representations from naturalistic images as well as generate high-quality samples.

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TL;DR: We propose an NF for simultaneous manifold and density-on-manifold learning.

Code: https://github.com/chrvt/denoising-normalizing-flow