Right, it is bizzare to read that someone "unearthed a forgotten AI technique" that you happened to have worked with/on when it was still hot - when did I become a fossil? :D
replyAlso, if we're being nitpicky, diffusion model inference has been proven equivalent to (and is often used as) a particular NF so.. shrug
They are both variational inference, but Normalizing Flow (NF) is not VAE.
replyIf you read the paper, you'll find "More Expressive Approximate Posteriors with Normalizing Flows" is in the methods section. The authors are in fact using (inverse) normalizing flows within the context of VAEs.
replyThe appendix goes on to explain, "We apply simple volume-preserving normalizing flows of the form z′ = z + b(z) to the samples generated by the encoder at each level".