Model reference · open weights

sd-vae-ft-mse-flax

Image enterprise-explorers Text→image 1 build Open weights 3k dl/mo

sd-vae-ft-mse-flax is an open-weight image model from enterprise-explorers.

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  • sd-vae-ft-mse-flax is a Flax implementation of a finetuned VAE decoder for text-to-image generation, intended for use with the diffusers library.
  • It was developed by enterprise-explorers and is licensed under the MIT licence.
  • The model was finetuned from the original kl-f8 autoencoder on a 1:1 ratio of LAION-Aesthetics and LAION-Humans to improve face reconstruction, using a loss function that emphasizes MSE reconstruction to produce smoother outputs.

Summary of the enterprise-explorers/sd-vae-ft-mse-flax model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byenterprise-explorers
Released2023-03-23

From the model card

What enterprise-explorers says about sd-vae-ft-mse-flax

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Utilizing

These weights are intended to be used with the 🧨 diffusers library. If you are looking for the model to use with the original CompVis Stable Diffusion codebase, come here.

This is a Flax version of the original weights

Decoder Finetuning

We publish two kl-f8 autoencoder versions, finetuned from the original kl-f8 autoencoder on a 1:1 ratio of LAION-Aesthetics and LAION-Humans, an unreleased subset containing only SFW images of humans. The intent was to fine-tune on the Stable Diffusion training set (the autoencoder was originally trained on OpenImages) but also enrich the dataset with images of humans to improve the reconstruction of faces. The first, ft-EMA, was resumed from the original checkpoint, trained for 313198 steps and uses EMA weights. It uses the same loss configuration as the original checkpoint (L1 + LPIPS). The second, ft-MSE, was resumed from ft-EMA and uses EMA weights and was trained for another 280k steps using a different loss, with more emphasis on MSE reconstruction (MSE + 0.1 * LPIPS). It produces somewhat ``smoother'' outputs. The batch size for both versions was 192 (16 A100s, batch size 12 per GPU). To keep compatibility with existing models, only the decoder part was finetuned; the checkpoints can be used as a drop-in replacement for the existing autoencoder.

Original kl-f8 VAE vs f8-ft-EMA vs f8-ft-MSE

Evaluation

COCO 2017 (256x256, val, 5000 images)

Modeltrain stepsrFIDPSNRSSIMPSIMLinkComments
original2468034.9923.4 +/- 3.80.69 +/- 0.141.01 +/- 0.28https://ommer-lab.com/files/latent-diffusion/kl-f8.zipas used in SD
ft-EMA5600014.4223.8 +/- 3.90.69 +/- 0.130.96 +/- 0.27https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-ema-original/resolve/main/vae-ft-ema-560000-ema-pruned.ckptslightly better overall, with EMA
ft-MSE8400014.7024.5 +/- 3.70.71 +/- 0.130.92 +/- 0.27https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-mse-original/resolve/main/vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.ckptresumed with EMA from ft-EMA, emphasis on MSE (rec. loss = MSE + 0.1 * LPIPS), smoother outputs

LAION-Aesthetics 5+ (256x256, subset, 10000 images)

Modeltrain stepsrFIDPSNRSSIMPSIMLinkComments
original2468032.6126.0 +/- 4.40.81 +/- 0.120.75 +/- 0.36https://ommer-lab.com/files/latent-diffusion/kl-f8.zipas used in SD
ft-EMA5600011.7726.7 +/- 4.80.82 +/- 0.120.67 +/- 0.34https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-ema-original/resolve/main/vae-ft-ema-560000-ema-pruned.ckptslightly better overall, with EMA
ft-MSE8400011.8827.3 +/- 4.70.83 +/- 0.110.65 +/- 0.34https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-mse-original/resolve/main/vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.ckptresumed with EMA from ft-EMA, emphasis on MSE (rec. loss = MSE + 0.1 * LPIPS), smoother outputs

Visual

Visualization of reconstructions on 256x256 images from the COCO2017 validation dataset.

256x256: ft-EMA (left), ft-MSE (middle), original (right)

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Running it yourself

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