CDFlow: Building Invertible Layers with Circulant and Diagonal Matrices

Normalizing flows are deep generative models that achieve efficient likelihood estimation and sampling through invertible transformations. A key challenge is designing linear layers that enhance expressiveness while enabling efficient computation of the Jacobian determinant and inverse. In this work, we introduce a novel invertible linear layer based on the product of circulant and diagonal matrices. This decomposition provides a parameter-and computation-efficient formulation, reducing the parameter complexity from O(n 2 ) to O(mn) by using m diagonal matrices together with m -1 circulant matrices, while approximating arbitrary linear transformations. Furthermore, leveraging the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), our method reduces the time complexity of matrix inversion from O(n 3 ) to O(mn log n) and matrix log-determinant from O(n 3 ) to O(mn), where n is the input dimension. Building upon this, we introduce a novel normalizing flow model called Circulant-Diagonal Flow (CDFlow). Empirical results demonstrate that CDFlow excels in density estimation for natural image datasets and effectively models data with inherent periodicity. In terms of computational efficiency, our method speeds up the matrix inverse and log-determinant computations by 1.17× and 4.31×, respectively, compared to the general dense matrix, when the number of channels is set to 96.