Human brains don't recreate every pixel to understand the world!
Most current models in genomics, proteomics, and single-cell transcriptomics rely on generative objectives like masked language modeling or next token prediction. While effective, these architectures waste significant capacity reconstructing raw, noisy sequence details that may not carry functional biological meaning.
But a promising, more efficient alternative is emerging: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA)
Originally introduced by Yann LeCun for computer vision, JEPA is a non-generative, self-supervised learning (SSL) framework. Instead of predicting raw inputs, it operates as a world model that predicts abstract semantic embeddings in latent space.
Recently, the JEPA framework (and its more efficient LeJEPA variant) has been adapted into the biological sciences to develop performing foundation models and to improve on already existing ones.
It's interesting how each adaptation modified and tailored JEPA to suit its specific biological domain, whether by experimenting with different backbones or complementing the objective with other loss terms.
For example, JEPA-DNA and ProteinJEPA used JEPA as a continual pre-training framework to enhance existing foundation models without training from scratch, while Cell-JEPA and JEPA-DNA employed a hybrid objective that combines the JEPA loss with a traditional language modeling loss.
The article below provides an overview of these implementations, along with others that came out this year. As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome and highly appreciated!
In 2017, Google released the Transformer architecture. While it was clear the model was promising, absolutely no one (including its authors) anticipated the pervasive global revolution it would create!
The authors actually viewed the Transformer as just a stepping stone for a much more ambitious project: The MultiModel.
Their ultimate goal was to build a single deep learning architecture capable of jointly learning massive, diverse tasks across entirely different domains (in 2017). A One Model To Learn Them All.
In fact, the MultiModel paper was published in the exact same month as Attention Is All You Need!
But history had other plans. The building block eclipsed the grand design!
So, have you heard about the MultiModel before? ๐