# Turbo-VAED: Fast and Stable Transfer of Video-VAEs to Mobile Devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14905/) (2024)
- [Deep Compression Autoencoder for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10733/) (2024)
- [Seaweed-7B: Cost-Effective Training of Video Generation Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08685/) (2025)
- [CV-VAE: A Compatible Video VAE for Latent Generative Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20279/) (2024)
- [FasterDiT: Towards Faster Diffusion Transformers Training without Architecture Modification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10356/) (2024)
- [VidGen-1M: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02629/) (2024)
- [Masked Autoencoders Enable Efficient Knowledge Distillers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12256/) (2022)
- [ViTKD: Practical Guidelines for ViT feature knowledge distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02432/) (2022)
- [SnapGen-V: Generating a Five-Second Video within Five Seconds on a Mobile Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10494/) (2024)
- [Large Motion Video Autoencoding with Cross-modal Video VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17805/) (2024)
- [LeanVAE: An Ultra-Efficient Reconstruction VAE for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14325/) (2025)
- [On-device Sora: Enabling Training-Free Diffusion-based Text-to-Video Generation for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04363/) (2025)
- [H3AE: High Compression, High Speed, and High Quality AutoEncoder for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10567/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08995/) (2026)
- [Speed by Simplicity: A Single-Stream Architecture for Fast Audio-Video Generative Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21986/) (2026)
- [SANA-Streaming: Real-time Streaming Video Editing with Hybrid Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30409/) (2026)
- [DiffusionVL: Translating Any Autoregressive Models into Diffusion Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15713/) (2025)
- [Flash-VAED: Plug-and-Play VAE Decoders for Efficient Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19161/) (2026)
- [Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15911/) (2026)
- [Video Generation Models as World Models: Efficient Paradigms, Architectures and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28489/) (2026)
- [MobileI2V: Fast and High-Resolution Image-to-Video on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21475/) (2025)
- [UniX: Unifying Autoregression and Diffusion for Chest X-Ray Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11522/) (2026)
- [MobileWan: Closing the Quality Gap for Mobile Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06173/) (2026)
- [Visko Orbis 1.0: A Live Model for Real-Time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26694/) (2026)
- [Early Failure Detection and Intervention in Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14320/) (2026)
- [FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14898/) (2026)
- [Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17585/) (2026)
- [UnStep: Training-Free Acceleration of Causal Video Diffusion with Fewer Steps Than Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32518/) (2026)
- [LightVAE: Towards Compact and Efficient Video Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14726/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a growing demand for deploying large generative AI models on mobile devices. For recent popular video generative models, however, the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) represents one of the major computational bottlenecks. Both large parameter sizes and mismatched kernels cause out-of-memory errors or extremely slow inference on mobile devices. To address this, we propose a low-cost solution that efficiently transfers widely used video VAEs to mobile devices. (1) We analyze redundancy in existing VAE architectures and get empirical design insights. By integrating 3D depthwise separable convolutions into our model, we significantly reduce the number of parameters. (2) We observe that the upsampling techniques in mainstream video VAEs are poorly suited to mobile hardware and form the main bottleneck. In response, we propose a decoupled 3D pixel shuffle scheme that slashes end-to-end delay. Building upon these, we develop a universal mobile-oriented VAE decoder, Turbo-VAED. (3) We propose an efficient VAE decoder training method. Since only the decoder is used during deployment, we distill it to Turbo-VAED instead of retraining the full VAE, enabling fast mobile adaptation with minimal performance loss. To our knowledge, our method enables real-time 720p video VAE decoding on mobile devices for the first time. This approach is widely applicable to most video VAEs. When integrated into four representative models, with training cost as low as 95, it accelerates original VAEs by up to 84.5x at 720p resolution on GPUs, uses as low as 17.5% of original parameter count, and retains 96.9% of the original reconstruction quality. Compared to mobile-optimized VAEs, Turbo-VAED achieves a 2.9x speedup in FPS and better reconstruction quality on the iPhone 16 Pro. The code and models will soon be available at https://github.com/hustvl/Turbo-VAED.