We propose a new way of constructing invertible neural networks by combining simple building blocks with a novel set of composition rules. This leads to a rich set of invertible architectures, including those similar to ResNets. Inversion is achieved with a locally convergent iterative procedure that is parallelizable and very fast in practice. Additionally, the determinant of the Jacobian can be computed analytically and efficiently, enabling their generative use as flow models. To demonstrate their flexibility, we show that our invertible neural networks are competitive with ResNets on MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification. When trained as generative models, our invertible networks achieve competitive likelihoods on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32x32, with bits per dimension of 0.98, 3.32 and 4.06 respectively.

Originality: While I would not call the use of masked transformations particularly novel in this setting, the authors present a satisfying and simple architecture which should be broadly applicable to many domains and tasks. This stands in contrast to many other invertible models which utilize very tailored and domain specific architectures. Quality: I believe this paper to be of high quality. The strong performance of the proposed architecture on generative modeling is well-backed by experimental results. I feel the classification experiments could have been stronger and presented more clearly.

This paper received OK scores overall, with little disparity in the final scores. There is consensus among reviewers that this paper is well-written, clear and that the experiments are well-designed. Novelty is a weak point of this work, which is more of a framework paper.

We propose a new way of constructing invertible neural networks by combining simple building blocks with a novel set of composition rules. This leads to a rich set of invertible architectures, including those similar to ResNets. Inversion is achieved with a locally convergent iterative procedure that is parallelizable and very fast in practice. Additionally, the determinant of the Jacobian can be computed analytically and efficiently, enabling their generative use as flow models. To demonstrate their flexibility, we show that our invertible neural networks are competitive with ResNets on MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification.

We propose a new way of constructing invertible neural networks by combining simple building blocks with a novel set of composition rules. This leads to a rich set of invertible architectures, including those similar to ResNets. Inversion is achieved with a locally convergent iterative procedure that is parallelizable and very fast in practice. Additionally, the determinant of the Jacobian can be computed analytically and efficiently, enabling their generative use as flow models. To demonstrate their flexibility, we show that our invertible neural networks are competitive with ResNets on MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification.