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Main Authors: Wang, Zile, Yu, Hao, Zhan, Jiabo, Yuan, Chun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09308
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author Wang, Zile
Yu, Hao
Zhan, Jiabo
Yuan, Chun
author_facet Wang, Zile
Yu, Hao
Zhan, Jiabo
Yuan, Chun
contents Recent advances in latent diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in high-fidelity RGB image synthesis by leveraging pretrained VAEs to compress and reconstruct pixel data at low computational cost. However, the generation of transparent or layered content (RGBA image) remains largely unexplored, due to the lack of large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we propose ALPHA, the first comprehensive RGBA benchmark that adapts standard RGB metrics to four-channel images via alpha blending over canonical backgrounds. We further introduce ALPHAVAE, a unified end-to-end RGBA VAE that extends a pretrained RGB VAE by incorporating a dedicated alpha channel. The model is trained with a composite objective that combines alpha-blended pixel reconstruction, patch-level fidelity, perceptual consistency, and dual KL divergence constraints to ensure latent fidelity across both RGB and alpha representations. Our RGBA VAE, trained on only 8K images in contrast to 1M used by prior methods, achieves a +4.9 dB improvement in PSNR and a +3.2% increase in SSIM over LayerDiffuse in reconstruction. It also enables superior transparent image generation when fine-tuned within a latent diffusion framework. Our code, data, and models are released on https://github.com/o0o0o00o0/AlphaVAE for reproducibility.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AlphaVAE: Unified End-to-End RGBA Image Reconstruction and Generation with Alpha-Aware Representation Learning
Wang, Zile
Yu, Hao
Zhan, Jiabo
Yuan, Chun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in latent diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in high-fidelity RGB image synthesis by leveraging pretrained VAEs to compress and reconstruct pixel data at low computational cost. However, the generation of transparent or layered content (RGBA image) remains largely unexplored, due to the lack of large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we propose ALPHA, the first comprehensive RGBA benchmark that adapts standard RGB metrics to four-channel images via alpha blending over canonical backgrounds. We further introduce ALPHAVAE, a unified end-to-end RGBA VAE that extends a pretrained RGB VAE by incorporating a dedicated alpha channel. The model is trained with a composite objective that combines alpha-blended pixel reconstruction, patch-level fidelity, perceptual consistency, and dual KL divergence constraints to ensure latent fidelity across both RGB and alpha representations. Our RGBA VAE, trained on only 8K images in contrast to 1M used by prior methods, achieves a +4.9 dB improvement in PSNR and a +3.2% increase in SSIM over LayerDiffuse in reconstruction. It also enables superior transparent image generation when fine-tuned within a latent diffusion framework. Our code, data, and models are released on https://github.com/o0o0o00o0/AlphaVAE for reproducibility.
title AlphaVAE: Unified End-to-End RGBA Image Reconstruction and Generation with Alpha-Aware Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09308