  Generative modeling of high-dimensional data is a key problem in machine
learning. Successful approaches include latent variable models and
autoregressive models. The complementary strengths of these approaches, to
model global and local image statistics respectively, suggest hybrid models
that encode global image structure into latent variables while autoregressively
modeling low level detail. Previous approaches to such hybrid models restrict
the capacity of the autoregressive decoder to prevent degenerate models that
ignore the latent variables and only rely on autoregressive modeling. Our
contribution is a training procedure relying on an auxiliary loss function that
controls which information is captured by the latent variables and what is left
to the autoregressive decoder. Our approach can leverage arbitrarily powerful
autoregressive decoders, achieves state-of-the art quantitative performance
among models with latent variables, and generates qualitatively convincing
samples.
