While recent machine learning research has revealed connections between deep generative models such as VAEs and rate-distortion losses used in learned compression, most of this work has focused on images. In a similar spirit, we view recently proposed neural video coding algorithms through the lens of deep autoregressive and latent variable modeling. We present recent neural video codecs as instances of a generalized stochastic temporal autoregressive transform, and propose new avenues for further improvements inspired by normalizing flows and structured priors. We propose several architectures that yield state-of-the-art video compression performance on full-resolution video and discuss their tradeoffs and ablations. In particular, we propose (i) improved temporal autoregressive transforms, (ii) improved entropy models with structured and temporal dependencies, and (iii) variable bitra
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