Integer Discrete Flows and Lossless Compression

Lossless compression methods shorten the expected representation size of data without loss of information, using a statistical model. Flow-based models are attractive in this setting because they admit exact likelihood optimization, which is equivalent to minimizing the expected number of bits per message. However, conventional flows assume continuous data, which may lead to reconstruction errors when quantized for compression. For that reason, we introduce a flow-based generative model for ordinal discrete data called Integer Discrete Flow (IDF): a bijective integer map that can learn rich transformations on high-dimensional data. As building blocks for IDFs, we introduce a flexible transformation layer called integer discrete coupling.