The NVAE Generative Residual Cell is a skip connection block used as part of the NVAE architecture for the generator. The residual cell expands the number of channels $E$ times before applying the depthwise separable convolution, and then maps it back to $C$ channels. The design motivation was to help model long-range correlations in the data by increasing the receptive field of the network, which explains the expanding path but also the use of depthwise convolutions to keep a handle on parameter count.