Papers › Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
Diederik P. Kingma, Prafulla Dhariwal
Flow-based generative models (Dinh et al., 2014) are conceptually attractive due to tractability of the exact log-likelihood, tractability of exact latent-variable inference, and parallelizability of both training and synthesis. In this paper we propose Glow, a simple type of generative flow using an invertible 1x1 convolution. Using our method we demonstrate a significant improvement in log-likelihood on standard benchmarks. Perhaps most strikingly, we demonstrate that a generative model optimized towards the plain log-likelihood objective is capable of efficient realistic-looking synthesis and manipulation of large images. The code for our model is available at https://github.com/openai/glow
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Density Estimation | ImageNet 32x32 | Glow | NLL (bits/dim) | 4.09 | #5 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Generation | CelebA 256x256 | Glow (Kingma and Dhariwal, 2018) | bpd | 1.03 | #10 of 17 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Generation | CelebA-HQ 256x256 | GLOW | FID | 68.93 | #17 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Generation | ImageNet 32x32 | Glow (Kingma and Dhariwal, 2018) | bpd | 4.09 | #34 of 35 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Generation | ImageNet 64x64 | Glow (Kingma and Dhariwal, 2018) | Bits per dim | 3.81 | #61 of 65 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Unsupervised Anomaly Detection | SMAP | Glow | AUC | 91.55 | #7 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Unsupervised Anomaly Detection | SMAP | Glow | F1 | 86.05 | #7 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Unsupervised Anomaly Detection | SMAP | Glow | Precision | 87.40 | #7 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Unsupervised Anomaly Detection | SMAP | Glow | Recall | 84.93 | #7 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Introduced by this paper: Activation Normalization, Invertible 1x1 Convolution
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