Papers › Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation
Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation
George Papamakarios, Theo Pavlakou, Iain Murray
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.
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Code
Syntology Ran 22 of 28 code samples harvested from 9 repositories linked to this paper; 6 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · honoured contract; 20 ran with no contract checked.
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21 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
28 samples harvested; 22 ran; 2 honoured the contract we drafted; 6 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
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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 | BSDS300 | MADE MoG | Log-likelihood | 153.71 | #4 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | CIFAR-10 | MAF | Log-likelihood (nats) | 3049 | #15 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | CIFAR-10 (Conditional) | MAF | Log-likelihood | 5872 | #1 of 1 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | MNIST | MADE MoG | Log-likelihood (nats) | -1038.5 | #6 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | UCI HEPMASS | MADE MoG | Log-likelihood | -15.15 | #4 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | UCI MINIBOONE | MADE MoG | Log-likelihood | -12.27 | #5 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Density Estimation | UCI POWER | MADE MoG | Log-likelihood | 0.4 | #5 of 6 | 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.
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