UniRA: Unified Representation Alignment and Auto-Encoding for Efficient Diffusion Generation

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for high-fidelity image synthesis, yet they suffer from slow training convergence and high computational cost. Two recent lines of work address this from complementary angles: Representation Alignment (REPA) accelerates DiT training by aligning intermediate features with a pretrained external representation model (e.g., DINOv2), while Representation Auto-Encoders (RAE) replace the pixel-space VAE with a compact representation-space tokenizer learned from self-supervised features. However, these approaches are developed and applied in isolation: REPA still relies on a pixel-space VAE for latent diffusion, and RAE does not exploit the alignment signal that accelerates the diffusion backbone. We present UniRA, a unified framework that couples representation alignment and representation auto-encoding into a single objective. UniRA learns a representation-space tokenizer whose output serves simultaneously as the diffusion target and the alignment anchor, so the tokenizer, the diffusion backbone, and the external representation model are co-optimized. We give a theoretical result showing that this joint optimization preserves the representation quality of the external model while accelerating diffusion convergence, and we derive a principled weighting that balances the reconstruction, alignment, and generation objectives. On ImageNet class-conditional generation at 256256 and 512512, UniRA matches or surpasses state-of-the-art DiTs (SD3, REPA, RAE) in FID while reducing training steps by up to 5*. We further show that the unified representation space supports improved zero-shot classification and linear probing, confirming that generation and understanding benefit from a shared, aligned latent space.