K-VAE

K-VAE is a family of open-source variational autoencoders for audio, image, and video generation. It transforms high-dimensional signals into compact continuous latent spaces that preserve detail and are designed for downstream diffusion models. In our evaluations, KVAE‑Audio and KVAE‑Video rank among the strongest open-source tokenizers, combining high‑fidelity reconstruction with quality of subsequent generation better than the compared alternatives.

Current models

KVAE 2.0 Image

0.2B params

KVAE 2.0 Image is a continuous image tokenizer designed for diffusion-based text-to-image generation. It uses 8×8 spatial compression with 32 latent channels and has approximately 0.2B parameters. In our reconstruction benchmarks, KVAE 2.0 Image outperforms the VAEs used in leading open-source text-to-image models in PSNR and SSIM. Its latent space also translates into stronger downstream generation: KVAE 2.0 Image is preferred by human side-by-side evaluation under a fixed text-to-image setup, which assesses prompt following, visual quality, and semantic consistency.

continuous latent 8×8 spatial 32 channels

KVAE 1.0 Audio

48 kHz

A continuous, full-band (48 kHz) audio autoencoder. It compresses raw waveforms into compact continuous latents and reconstructs them with high fidelity across speech, music, and general sound. The model is designed not only for faithful reconstruction, but as a latent space for generative models — in our internal text-to-audio pipeline, swapping the autoencoder for KVAE 1.0 Audio improves generation quality under a fixed generator.

continuous latent full-band
48 kHz

KVAE 2.0 Video

Causal

A family of causal video tokenizers built for diffusion-based generative models. In our reconstruction benchmarks and side-by-side evaluations, the released models outperform the compared open‑source tokenizers on key measures of reconstruction and generation quality. Both variants use 4× temporal compression, with 8×8 or 16×16 spatial compression. A purely convolutional architecture and cached temporal context enable efficient chunked processing of long videos.

4× temporal conv-only
8×8 / 16×16 spatial

Previous versions

Mar 2026

KVAE‑2D‑1.0

The first-generation image tokenizer from the K‑VAE family, paired with KVAE‑3D‑1.0

Mar 2026

KVAE‑3D‑1.0

The first-generation video tokenizer from the K‑VAE family, superseded by KVAE‑Video 2.0