  We introduce a deep, generative autoencoder capable of learning hierarchies
of distributed representations from data. Successive deep stochastic hidden
layers are equipped with autoregressive connections, which enable the model to
be sampled from quickly and exactly via ancestral sampling. We derive an
efficient approximate parameter estimation method based on the minimum
description length (MDL) principle, which can be seen as maximising a
variational lower bound on the log-likelihood, with a feedforward neural
network implementing approximate inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art
generative performance on a number of classic data sets: several UCI data sets,
MNIST and Atari 2600 games.
