arXiv · 2510.25323
CDFlow: Building Invertible Layers with Circulant and Diagonal Matrices
Abstract
Normalizing flows are deep generative models that enable efficient likelihood estimation and sampling through invertible transformations. A key challenge is to design linear layers that enhance expressiveness while maintaining efficient computation of the Jacobian determinant and inverse. We introduce a novel invertible linear layer based on the product of circulant and diagonal matrices. This decomposition reduces parameter complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(mn)$ using $m$ diagonal matrices and $m-1$ circulant matrices while still approximating general linear transformations. By leveraging the Fast Fourier Transform, our approach reduces the time complexity of matrix inversion from $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(mn\log n)$ and that of computing the log-determinant from $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(mn)$, where $n$ is the input dimension. We build upon this layer to develop Circulant-Diagonal Flow (CDFlow), which achieves strong density estimation on natural image datasets and effectively models data with inherent periodic structure. Furthermore, CDFlow significantly accelerates key operations in normalizing flows, providing practical benefits for scalable generative modeling.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Xuchen Feng, Siyu Liao. 2025-10-29. CDFlow: Building Invertible Layers with Circulant and Diagonal Matrices. https://doi.org/10.52202/085713-0124
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
Discover connections
Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.