VAE (Variational Auto Encoder)¶

What does a VAE do?¶

A VAE is trained for certain aspects of the image, and the default VAE bundled in our UI (vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned) improves the eyes in generated images.

Stable Diffusion UI installs and starts using the vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned VAE file that works with all Stable diffusion models. This uses the official one: https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/sd-vae-ft-mse-original

How to use a custom VAE?¶

Put your VAE file ending with .ckpt or .vae.pt inside the models/vae folder, like this:

Then refresh your browser UI. After that, you can select the desired VAE file in Image Settings:

VAE Tiling¶

On the v3.x engines (see Engines), Image Settings also has an Enable VAE Tiling option. It decodes the image in tiles, which greatly reduces the GPU memory needed for large images, at a small speed cost. Enable it if you get out-of-memory errors at large image sizes.