Normalising flows (NFS) map two density functions via a differentiable bijection whose Jacobian determinant can be computed
efficiently. Recently, as an alternative to hand-crafted bijections, Huang et al.(2018) proposed neural autoregressive flow
(NAF) which is a universal approximator for density functions. Their flow is a neural network (NN) whose parameters are predicted
by another NN. The latter grows quadratically with the size of the former and thus an efficient technique for parametrization
is needed. We propose block neural autoregressive flow (B-NAF), a much more compact universal approximator of density functions,
where we model a bijection directly using a single feed-forward network. Invertibility is ensured by carefully designing each
affine transformation with block matrices that make the flow autoregressive and (strictly) monotone. We compare B-NAF to NAF
and other established flows on density estimation and approximate inference for latent variable models. Our proposed flow
is competitive across datasets while using orders of magnitude fewer parameters.