REPA-E/e2e-sdvae-hf
<h1 align="center"> REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning of Latent Diffusion Transformers </h1>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=GQzvqS4AAAAJ" target="blank">Xingjian Leng</a><sup>1*</sup>   <b>·</b>   <a href="https://1jsingh.github.io/" target="blank">Jaskirat Singh</a><sup>1*</sup>   <b>·</b>   <a href="https://hou-yz.github.io/" target="blank">Yunzhong Hou</a><sup>1</sup>   <b>·</b>   <a href="https://people.csiro.au/X/Z/Zhenchang-Xing/" target="blank">Zhenchang Xing</a><sup>2</sup>  <b>·</b>   <a href="https://www.sainingxie.com/" target="blank">Saining Xie</a><sup>3</sup>  <b>·</b>   <a href="https://zheng-lab-anu.github.io/" target="blank">Liang Zheng</a><sup>1</sup>  </p>
<p align="center"> <sup>1</sup> Australian National University   <sup>2</sup>Data61-CSIRO   <sup>3</sup>New York University   <br> <sub><sup>*</sup>Project Leads </sub> </p>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://End2End-Diffusion.github.io">🌐 Project Page</a>   <a href="https://huggingface.co/REPA-E">🤗 Models</a>   <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10483">📃 Paper</a>   <br> <!-- <a href="https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-generation-on-imagenet-256x256?p=repa-e-unlocking-vae-for-end-to-end-tuning-of"><img src="https://img.shields.io/endpoint.svg?url=https://paperswithcode.com/badge/repa-e-unlocking-vae-for-end-to-end-tuning-of/image-generation-on-imagenet-256x256" alt="PWC"></a> --> </p>
<!-- <p align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/End2End-Diffusion/REPA-E/raw/main/assets/vis-examples.jpg" width="100%" alt="teaser"> </p> -->
We address a fundamental question: *Can latent diffusion models and their VAE tokenizer be trained end-to-end? While training both components jointly with standard diffusion loss is observed to be ineffective — often degrading final performance — we show that this limitation can be overcome using a simple representation-alignment (REPA) loss. Our proposed method, REPA-E*, enables stable and effective joint training of both the VAE and the diffusion model.
<p align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/End2End-Diffusion/REPA-E/raw/main/assets/overview.jpg" width="100%" alt="teaser"> </p>
REPA-E significantly accelerates training — achieving over 17× speedup compared to REPA and 45× over the vanilla training recipe. Interestingly, end-to-end tuning also improves the VAE itself: the resulting E2E-VAE provides better latent structure and serves as a drop-in replacement for existing VAEs (e.g., SD-VAE), improving convergence and generation quality across diverse LDM architectures. Our method achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on ImageNet 256×256: 1.12 with CFG and 1.69 without CFG.
<h1 align="left" style="color:#ff000d">🆕 AutoencoderKL-Compatible Release</h1>
New in this release: We are releasing the REPA-E E2E-VAE as a fully Hugging Face AutoencoderKL checkpoint — ready to use with diffusers out of the box.We previously released the REPA-E VAE checkpoint, which required loading through the model class in our REPA-E repository. This new version provides a Hugging Face–compatible AutoencoderKL checkpoint that can be loaded directly via the diffusers API — no extra code or custom wrapper needed.
It offers plug-and-play compatibility with diffusion pipelines and can be seamlessly used to build or train new diffusion models.
⚡️ Quickstart
from diffusers import AutoencoderKL
vae = AutoencoderKL.from_pretrained("REPA-E/e2e-sdvae-hf").to("cuda")Usevae.encode(...)/vae.decode(...)in your pipeline. (A full example is provided below.)
📦 Requirements
The following packages are required to load and run the REPA-E VAEs with the diffusers library:
pip install diffusers>=0.33.0
pip install torch>=2.3.1🚀 Example Usage
Below is a minimal example showing how to load and use the REPA-E end-to-end trained SD-VAE with diffusers:
from io import BytesIO
import requests
from diffusers import AutoencoderKL
import numpy as np
import torch
from PIL import Image
response = requests.get("https://s3.amazonaws.com/masters.galleries.prod.dpreview.com/2935392.jpg?X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAUIXIAMA3N436PSEA/20251019/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20251019T103721Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=219dc5f98e5c2e5f3b72587716f75889b8f45b0a01f1bd08dbbc44106e484144")
device = "cuda"
image = torch.from_numpy(
np.array(
Image.open(BytesIO(response.content)).resize((512, 512))
)
).permute(2, 0, 1).unsqueeze(0).to(torch.float32) / 127.5 - 1
image = image.to(device)
vae = AutoencoderKL.from_pretrained("REPA-E/e2e-sdvae-hf").to(device)
with torch.no_grad():
latents = vae.encode(image).latent_dist.sample()
reconstructed = vae.decode(latents).sample
📚 Citation
@article{leng2025repae,
title={REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers},
author={Xingjian Leng and Jaskirat Singh and Yunzhong Hou and Zhenchang Xing and Saining Xie and Liang Zheng},
year={2025},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10483},
}