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Title: VideoFlow: A Conditional Flow-Based Model for Stochastic Video Generation

Paper content:
Generative models that can model and predict sequences of future events can, in principle, learn to capture complex real-world phenomena, such as physical interactions.
However, a central challenge in video prediction is that the future is highly uncertain: a sequence of past observations of events can imply many possible futures.
Although a number of recent works have studied probabilistic models that can represent uncertain futures, such models are either extremely expensive computationally as in the case of pixel-level autoregressive models, or do not directly optimize the likelihood of the data.
To our knowledge, our work is the first to propose multi-frame video prediction with normalizing flows, which allows for direct optimization of the data likelihood, and produces high-quality stochastic predictions.
We describe an approach for modeling the latent space dynamics, and demonstrate that flow-based generative models offer a viable and competitive approach to generative modeling of video.
Exponential progress in the capabilities of computational hardware, paired with a relentless effort towards greater insights and better methods, has pushed the field of machine learning from relative obscurity into the mainstream.
Progress in the field has translated to improvements in various capabilities, such as classification of images (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) , machine translation (Vaswani et al., 2017) and super-human game-playing agents (Mnih et al., 2013; Silver et al., 2017) , among others.
However, the application of machine learning technology has been largely constrained to situations where large amounts of supervision is available, such as in image classification or machine translation, or where highly accurate simulations of the environment are available to the learning agent, such as in game-playing agents.
An appealing alternative to supervised learning is to utilize large unlabeled datasets, combined with predictive generative models.
In order for a complex generative model to be able to effectively predict future events, it must build up an internal representation of the world.
For example, a predictive generative model that can predict future frames in a video would need to model complex real-world phenomena, such as physical interactions.
This provides an appealing mechanism for building models that have a rich understanding of the physical world, without any labeled examples.
Videos of real-world interactions are plentiful and readily available, and a large generative model can be trained on large unlabeled datasets containing many video sequences, thereby learning about a wide range of real-world phenoma.
Such a model could be useful for learning representations for further downstream tasks (Mathieu et al., 2016) , or could even be used directly in applications where predicting the future enables effective decision making and control, such as robotics (Finn et al., 2016) .
A central challenge in video prediction is that the future is highly uncertain: a short sequence of observations of the present can imply many possible futures.
Although a number of recent works have studied probabilistic models that can represent uncertain futures, such models are either extremely expensive computationally (as in the case of pixel-level autoregressive models), or do not directly optimize the likelihood of the data.
In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic prediction, focusing specifically on the case of conditional video prediction: synthesizing raw RGB video frames conditioned on a short context of past observations (Ranzato et al., 2014; Srivastava et al., 2015; Vondrick et al., 2015; Xingjian et al., 2015; Boots et al., 2014) .
Specifically, we propose a new class of video prediction models that can provide exact likelihoods, generate diverse stochastic futures, and accurately synthesize realistic and high-quality video frames.
The main idea behind our approach is to extend flow-based generative models (Dinh et al., 2014; into the setting of conditional video prediction.
To our knowledge, flow-based models have been applied only to generation of non-temporal data, such as images (Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018) , and to audio sequences (Prenger et al., 2018) .
Conditional generation of videos presents its own unique challenges: the high dimensionality of video sequences makes them difficult to model as individual datapoints.
Instead, we learn a latent dynamical system model that predicts future values of the flow model's latent state.
This induces Markovian dynamics on the latent state of the system, replacing the standard unconditional prior distribution.
We further describe a practically applicable architecture for flow-based video prediction models, inspired by the Glow model for image generation (Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018) , which we call VideoFlow.
Our empirical results show that VideoFlow achieves results that are competitive with the state-ofthe-art in stochastic video prediction on the action-free BAIR dataset, with quantitative results that rival the best VAE-based models.
VideoFlow also produces excellent qualitative results, and avoids many of the common artifacts of models that use pixel-level mean-squared-error for training (e.g., blurry predictions), without the challenges associated with training adversarial models.
Compared to models based on pixel-level autoregressive prediction, VideoFlow achieves substantially faster test-time image synthesis 1 , making it much more practical for applications that require real-time prediction, such as robotic control .
Finally, since VideoFlow directly optimizes the likelihood of training videos, without relying on a variational lower bound, we can evaluate its performance directly in terms of likelihood values.
We describe a practically applicable architecture for flow-based video prediction models, inspired by the Glow model for image generation Kingma & Dhariwal (2018) , which we call VideoFlow.
We introduce a latent dynamical system model that predicts future values of the flow model's latent state replacing the standard unconditional prior distribution.
Our empirical results show that VideoFlow achieves results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art VAE models in stochastic video prediction.
Finally, our model optimizes log-likelihood directly making it easy to evaluate while achieving faster synthesis compared to pixel-level autoregressive video models, making our model suitable for practical purposes.
In future work, we plan to incorporate memory in VideoFlow to model arbitrary long-range dependencies and apply the model to challenging downstream tasks.

assistant: text: We demonstrate that flow-based generative models offer a viable and competitive approach to generative modeling of video.