Run REPA-E and SD-family VAEs on a Mac through PyTorch + MPS first.
That gives you the Apple GPU path with the fewest moving parts.
This repo uses diffusers AutoencoderKL checkpoints directly:
stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-mse
REPA-E/e2e-sdvae-hf
REPA-E/e2e-flux-vae
REPA-E’s Hugging Face releases are already diffusers-compatible, so you do not need a custom wrapper just to encode/decode images.
REPA-E’s own repo and model cards are the reference points for these weights and their intended use.
PyTorch’s mps device is the supported Apple GPU backend.
On macOS 12.3+ with an MPS-capable Apple device, moving tensors and models to "mps" runs them on the GPU. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
For REPA-E specifically, the current Hugging Face releases are loadable through diffusers.AutoencoderKL.from_pretrained(...), and the model cards list diffusers>=0.33.0 and torch>=2.3.1 as the required baseline. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}