# KVAE: Family of Tokenizers for Multimodal Generative Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05798/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 68 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02612/) (2016)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22699/) (2025)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [Efficient Training of Audio Transformers with Patchout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05069/) (2021)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Kandinsky 6.0 Video: Foundation Models for Synchronized Video and Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05608/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Latent diffusion modeling (LDM), a prominent paradigm, utilizes tokenizers to map input signal to compressed representation. This dependency positions tokenizer as an integral part of generation process itself, since it affects learning speed, quality of synthesized samples and lay foundation for later applications. This report presents series of KVAE tokenizers for audio, image and video, all designed for subsequent text-conditioned generation: KVAE-Audio, a continuous full-band 48 kHz tokenizer with a 50 Hz latent of 64 channels; KVAE-3D -- two causal video tokenizers for 4x16x16 and 4x8x8 compression; KVAE-2D, an image model, compressing input by factor of 8 with 32 channels. We demonstrate that reconstruction (PSNR, LPIPS, PESQ, etc.) and generation results on objective (Frechet Distance, CLIP score, CLAP score, etc.) and subjective (side-by-side evaluation) metrics matches or surpasses frontier opensource tokenizers, such as VAEs from Wan-2.2, HunyuanVideo-1.5, FLUX.2, MovieGen, StableAudio and MMAudio. Considering difficulty of development, we share with community training details, model selection method and ablation on design choices. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/kandinskylab/kvae and https://github.com/kandinskylab/kvae-audio.