REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion
  Transformers
Authors: name: Xingjian Leng; name: Jaskirat Singh; name: Yunzhong Hou; name: Zhenchang Xing; name: Saining Xie; name: Liang Zheng
Published: 2025-04-14 17:59:53

Abstract: In this paper we tackle a fundamental question: "Can we train latent
diffusion models together with the variational auto-encoder (VAE) tokenizer in
an end-to-end manner?" Traditional deep-learning wisdom dictates that
end-to-end training is often preferable when possible. However, for latent
diffusion transformers, it is observed that end-to-end training both VAE and
diffusion-model using standard diffusion-loss is ineffective, even causing a
degradation in final performance. We show that while diffusion loss is
ineffective, end-to-end training can be unlocked through the
representation-alignment (REPA) loss -- allowing both VAE and diffusion model
to be jointly tuned during the training process. Despite its simplicity, the
proposed training recipe (REPA-E) shows remarkable performance; speeding up
diffusion model training by over 17x and 45x over REPA and vanilla training
recipes, respectively. Interestingly, we observe that end-to-end tuning with
REPA-E also improves the VAE itself; leading to improved latent space structure
and downstream generation performance. In terms of final performance, our
approach sets a new state-of-the-art; achieving FID of 1.26 and 1.83 with and
without classifier-free guidance on ImageNet 256 x 256. Code is available at
https://end2end-diffusion.github.io.