Motif VAE is a 3D causal video VAE with 4x temporal and 32x spatial compression and a
128-channel latent space, built as a high-compression tokenizer for latent video diffusion
models. A 256x256x17-frame clip encodes to a (128, 5, 8, 8) latent, which is 1/16 the
spatio-temporal tokens of an 8x-spatial VAE, so downstream diffusion-transformer training and
inference cost less. The decoder is much larger than the encoder (about 4:1 in parameters),
which helps it keep fine detail such as small text in documents.
It also runs as a plain image VAE at T=1. In its compression class it has the best document
text fidelity, video reconstruction, and diffusability (how well a diffusion model converges on
its latents) of the tokenizers we compared.
Architecture
MotifVAE architecture: a 5-stage convolutional encoder with a parameter-free Global Skip (pixel unshuffle + channel average) at every stage compresses the clip into a deterministic latent; a 4.14x-larger 5-stage decoder mirrors it back to pixels.
The model code ships inside this repository (modeling_motifvae.py) and loads through the
stock diffusers AutoModel — no extra package beyond torch, diffusers, einops:
python
1import torch
2from diffusers import AutoModel
34vae = AutoModel.from_pretrained("Motif-Technologies/Motif-VAE", trust_remote_code=True)5vae = vae.to("cuda", dtype=torch.bfloat16).eval()67# video: (B, 3, T, H, W) in [-1, 1], T = 4n+1 (1, 5, 9, 13, 17, ...),8# H/W multiples of 32. T=1 works as a plain image VAE.9x = torch.randn(1,3,17,256,256, device="cuda", dtype=torch.bfloat16)10with torch.no_grad():11 z = vae.encode(x).latent_dist.sample()# (1, 128, 5, 8, 8)12 rec = vae.decode(z).sample # (1, 3, 17, 256, 256)
For diffusion training, whiten the latent to roughly unit variance with the per-channel
statistics shipped in the config — shift is the channel mean and scale the channel std
(128 values each, measured over Kinetics-400 video (256x256x17) and ImageNet-1K images (256x256)).
Apply per channel, reshaping both to (1, 128, 1, 1, 1):
python
1z = vae.encode(x).latent_dist.sample()2shift = torch.tensor(vae.config.shift, device=z.device).view(1,-1,1,1,1)3scale = torch.tensor(vae.config.scale, device=z.device).view(1,-1,1,1,1)4z =(z - shift)/ scale # whiten for the diffusion model5# ... sample/denoise in this space, then invert before decoding:6z = z * scale + shift
7rec = vae.decode(z).sample
Recompute these statistics on your own data if its distribution differs from natural video.
Evaluation
Baseline numbers are either the published values cited in each table or measured by us under
the same protocol. MotifVAE is a 32x spatial tokenizer, so the comparison is against the
other 32x tokenizers (LTX-Video, LTX-2, and the f32 image VAEs below); the lower-compression
16x Wan2.2 appears only as a reference upper bound.
Image reconstruction — ImageNet-1K val (256x256) & FFHQ (1024x1024)
All models below are 32x (f32) image VAEs. MotifVAE is measured by us with per-image
PSNR / SSIM (the published-table convention); baseline rows are the published numbers from the
Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 technical report (Table 2, same ImageNet-256 / FFHQ protocol). Our own
runs of the baselines reproduce those values to within 0.2 dB, so the comparison is direct.
Model
Setting
ImageNet PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
FFHQ PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
MotifVAE
f32c128
30.27
0.852
36.17
0.921
Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0
f32c128
29.69
0.842
35.91
0.918
LTX-Video
f32c128
29.57
0.833
35.56
0.905
HunyuanImage-2.1
f32c64
28.67
0.820
35.30
0.911
LTX-2
f32c128
26.06
0.793
33.63
0.906
DC-AE (Sana)
f32c32
24.82
0.690
31.35
0.830
At the f32c128 channel budget MotifVAE leads both benchmarks among 32x image VAEs, above
Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0's f32c128 (29.69 / 35.91 dB), LTX-Video, LTX-2, and the lighter f32c64 /
f32c32 models.
Qualitative comparison (real photographs)
GT vs frozen-tokenizer reconstruction on ImageNet-1K val photographs; the red box marks the
zoom strip shown below each row.
Natural-image reconstruction (ImageNet-1K val): GT vs MotifVAE vs LTX-Video vs LTX-2 vs Wan2.2
These rows are high-frequency patterns that high-compression VAEs find hard: an armadillo's
banded shell, a dense solar-panel grid, brickwork, and vehicle markings. LTX-Video and LTX-2
(same 32x class) lose the pattern, and the solar grid collapses for them entirely. MotifVAE
keeps it and stays close to the 16x Wan2.2 reference, which also struggles on some of these.
Document text fidelity — OmniDoc-TokenBench (256x256)
f32-compression VAEs on OmniDoc-TokenBench (~3K text-rich documents). Baseline rows are the
published numbers from the Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 technical report (Table 3, same benchmark
/ resolution / OCR-NED protocol); sorted by NED.
Model
Setting
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
OCR-NED ↑
MotifVAE
f32c128
0.849
22.40
0.052
3.43
0.825
Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0
f32c128
0.844
22.13
0.064
3.36
0.707
LTX-Video
f32c128
0.806
20.92
0.119
17.10
0.565
HunyuanImage-2.1
f32c64
0.781
19.85
0.096
5.19
0.490
LTX-2
f32c128
0.735
18.41
0.119
9.94
0.357
DC-AE (Sana)
f32c32
0.526
15.62
0.144
7.26
0.069
MotifVAE has the highest OCR-NED of any f32 VAE here: +0.12 over Qwen's f32c128 (same channel
budget) and about 2.3x that of LTX-Video / LTX-2. It also leads every pixel metric in its class.
The figure below covers English print, Korean print, and Korean handwriting; each row shows the
full page and a zoom-in on the red-boxed region. The top two rows are OmniDoc-TokenBench
(English); the bottom two are Korean printed text and handwriting from
AI-Hub — Korea's national AI-data hub (operated by NIA, the National
Information Society Agency), which publishes large-scale Korean AI training datasets (the table
metrics above are OmniDoc-only):
Document reconstruction — top two rows OmniDoc-TokenBench (English), bottom two rows Korean print + handwriting from AIHUB; GT vs MotifVAE vs LTX-Video vs LTX-2 vs Wan2.2
Video reconstruction — Kinetics-400 (256x256) & OpenVid-1M (720p)
The same four frozen tokenizers on both benchmarks, under one pipeline: the three 32x spatial
tokenizers (MotifVAE, LTX-Video, LTX-2) and the 16x Wan2.2 as a reference.
Kinetics-400 val — 17x256x256
Model
compression
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
MotifVAE
4x32x32
35.37
0.954
0.046
LTX-Video
8x32x32
32.58
0.919
0.101
LTX-2
8x32x32
28.05
0.888
0.128
Wan2.2
4x16x16
37.41
0.966
0.034
OpenVid val-1000 — native 720p, full-frame
Model
compression
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
MotifVAE
4x32x32
36.96
0.953
0.040
LTX-Video
8x32x32
34.40
0.925
0.055
LTX-2
8x32x32
32.94
0.923
0.044
Wan2.2
4x16x16
38.40
0.964
0.018
Among the 32x spatial tokenizers MotifVAE leads both tables: +2.7 dB over LTX-Video and
+7.3 dB over LTX-2 on K400, and +2.6 / +4.0 dB on 720p. The 16x Wan2.2 reference is a little
ahead; the gap to the other 32x VAEs is largest on high-motion clips (examples below).
Protocol. K400: 256 random val clips. OpenVid: the pinned public
Dev-Jahn/OpenVid-1M-wds val split
(1000 clips), each resized to height 720 keeping aspect (full-frame). Both use 17 frames/clip
and report per-frame-averaged PSNR / SSIM / LPIPS under one pipeline; OpenVid LPIPS uses AlexNet.
Absolute values aren't comparable across papers.
Video reconstruction examples
Frozen-tokenizer reconstruction on high-motion Kinetics-400 clips. Each clip is one strip:
Input / MotifVAE / LTX-Video / LTX-2 / Wan2.2 (labelled). MotifVAE keeps the fast motion close
to the 16x Wan2.2; LTX-Video and LTX-2 blur it.
Latte-XL/1 (patch-1, rectified flow, 250K steps, no-CFG FVD-2048) over each frozen
tokenizer, under the Latte-official stride-3 protocol. The Wan2.2 control (FVD 204) is
in line with values reported for this setting in the literature, confirming the harness
reproduces the expected scale.
UCF101 FVD convergence over frozen tokenizers
Tokenizer
FVD @50K
FVD @100K
FVD @250K
MotifVAE (4x32x32)
636
385
276
LTX-2 (8x32x32)
952
556
450
LTX-Video (8x32x32)
1251
732
593
Wan2.2 (4x16x16)
656
304
204
Among the 32x spatial tokenizers MotifVAE leads at every milestone, finishing 39% below LTX-2
and 53% below LTX-Video. It reaches LTX-2's final 250K FVD by about 75K steps (~3x faster) and
stays close to the 16x Wan2.2 reference. Reconstruction quality and diffusability are separate
properties: LTX-Video reconstructs better than LTX-2 but is the worst of the three for diffusion.