{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/denoising-normalizing-flow","title":"Denoising Normalizing Flow","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-12-01","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Christian Horvat","Jean-Pascal Pfister"],"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.","url_abs":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/4c07fe24771249c343e70c32289c1192-Abstract.html","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/4c07fe24771249c343e70c32289c1192-Paper.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"denoising-normalizing-flow","repo_url":"https://github.com/chrvt/denoising-normalizing-flow","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"denoising","task_name":"Denoising"},{"task_slug":"density-estimation","task_name":"Density Estimation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}