Papers › PixelCNN Models with Auxiliary Variables for Natural Image Modeling

PixelCNN Models with Auxiliary Variables for Natural Image Modeling

24 Dec 2016ICML 2017 8arXiv:1612.08185archive 2025-07-28

Alexander Kolesnikov, Christoph H. Lampert

We study probabilistic models of natural images and extend the autoregressive family of PixelCNN architectures by incorporating auxiliary variables. Subsequently, we describe two new generative image models that exploit different image transformations as auxiliary variables: a quantized grayscale view of the image or a multi-resolution image pyramid. The proposed models tackle two known shortcomings of existing PixelCNN models: 1) their tendency to focus on low-level image details, while largely ignoring high-level image information, such as object shapes, and 2) their computationally costly procedure for image sampling. We experimentally demonstrate benefits of the proposed models, in particular showing that they produce much more realistically looking image samples than previous state-of-the-art probabilistic models.

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Tasks

Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Generation ImageNet 64x64 PixelCNN Bits per dim 3.57 #49 of 65 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

PixelCNN

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