The reconstructed image looks okay, but the sampling results are very poor

[JaosonMa]

i used the VanillaAE, used all the celeba img_align_celeba data, 200k
this is epoch 28 reconstructed image:

this is epoch 28 sample image:

i think the sample was very bad, how can it happen?

[brockbrownwork]

It's possible that you're overfitting. I just posted an issue about this, but I think the convolutional layers are supposed to get fewer channels toward the middle because it's an autoencoder, not more channels in the middle. Try reversing hidden_dims maybe and train again.

Edit: never mind, I missed the fact that there's a stride of two, so it does create a bottleneck in the middle. Also apparently increasing the channels toward the middle isn't uncommon.