Review for NeurIPS paper: Hierarchical Quantized Autoencoders

Post-rebuttal, 3 out of 4 reviewers vote for acceptance while R1 esteems it is marginally below threshold. All 4 reviewers appreciated the convincing results in low-bitcount regimes. The two main points debated in the discussion phase concerned: a) whether there was sufficient novelty in the work w.r.t. For this, R4 convincingly argued that the paper significantly contributes to the learned compression sub-field. VQ-VAE, taking into account the author response and following reviewer discussion, the AC agrees that there are original aspects in the proposed algorithm that make it markedly different, with reasonable justification and ablation.