Before revision:  As a proof of concept, we show that a Transformer trained on this input (which we refer to as "the DEformer", i.e., the distribution estimating Transformer) can effectively model binarized-MNIST, approaching the average negative log-likelihood of fixed order autoregressive distribution estimating algorithms while still being entirely order-agnostic  .
After revision:  As a proof of concept, we show that a Transformer trained on this input (which we refer to as "the DEformer", i.e., the distribution estimating Transformer) can effectively model binarized-MNIST, approaching the average negative log-likelihood of fixed order autoregressive distribution estimating algorithms while still being entirely order-agnostic . Additionally, we find that the DEformer surpasses the performance of recent flow-based architectures when modeling a tabular dataset .