A method and apparatus for variable rate compression with a conditional autoencoder is herein provided. According to one embodiment, a method for compression includes receiving a first image and a first scheme as inputs for an autoencoder network; determining a first Lagrange multiplier based on the first scheme; and using the first image and the first Lagrange multiplier as inputs, computing a second image from the autoencoder network. The autoencoder network is trained using a plurality of Lagrange multipliers and a second image as training inputs.