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Nov 5

SiamJEPA: On the Role of Siamese Student Encoders in JEPA

Recently, Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have attracted significant attention in the computer vision and machine learning communities as a promising framework for self-supervised representation learning. Unlike masked autoencoders that reconstruct pixels, JEPA models learn representations by predicting latent embeddings of masked regions. Existing JEPA-based methods, such as I-JEPA and V-JEPA, typically employ a single encoder in the student network. In contrast, using Siamese encoders for student network is more naturally aligned with brain-inspired representation learning frameworks, yet their role in JEPA models remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Siamese student encoders in JEPA-based representation learning. To this end, we propose SiamJEPA, masked Siamese student encoders equipped with an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher network. SiamJEPA can also be viewed as a JEPA formulation of the brain-inspired representation learning model PhiNet. Through extensive experiments on ImageNet linear probing, we demonstrate that Siamese encoders act as an effective regularizer for the JEPA objective, improving representation separability and accelerating learning during the early stages of training. Furthermore, SiamJEPA consistently outperforms comparable single-encoder JEPA variants under limited training budgets and achieves higher linear probing accuracy than Masked Autoencoders (MAE) which requires longer training. Our findings reveal that Siamese student encoders are not merely an architectural choice but constitute an important inductive bias for predictive representation learning. These results provide new insights into the design of JEPA-based models and suggest that incorporating Siamese student architectures offers a simple yet effective approach for improving self-supervised representation learning.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 3 2

AD-E2E-JEPA: A Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture For End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires world models that can understand the physical world, reason and plan, and operate safely. In this paper, we first systematically evaluate existing action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) world models, including LeWM, DINO-WM, and JEPA-WM for end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD). To isolate world-model quality from policy learning, we employ a goal-conditioned zero-shot planning setting that evaluates these models using ground-truth future observations as goals, without training any driving policy. We find that existing JEPA-based world models are either accurate for driving but computationally expensive, or computationally efficient but insufficient for planning. To address this trade-off, we propose AD-E2E-JEPA, which introduces a SIGReg-regularized learnable projector applied to projected patch embeddings. The projector reduces the number of planning patches by 16times and the embedding dimension by 4times, achieving a 100times inference speedup while retaining planning performance, with a 0.8-second runtime for an 8-frame rollout over 256 candidate trajectories. Without training any driving policy, the world model itself reaches the goals located 20 meters away on average within the displacement of respectively 4.0/2.8 meters, using world-model rollouts over trajectory vocabularies of respectively 256/8,192 candidates. On the NAVSIMv2 benchmark, it achieves 67.3/72.9 EPDMS with multiplicative safety metrics and 84.1/86.5 EPDMS^{dagger} without them in goal-conditioned zero-shot planning. Experiments further show that the self-supervised pretrained projector improves downstream imitation learning performance from 80.2 to 85.4 EPDMS. The source code is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-E2E-JEPA

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 27

Delta-JEPA: Learning Action-Sensitive World Models via Latent Difference Decoding

Learning visual world models for planning requires compact latent dynamics that remain sensitive to actions, yet reconstruction-free joint-embedding objectives can collapse to action-insensitive representations. We propose Delta-JEPA, an end-to-end reconstruction-free world model that augments latent forward prediction with a Latent Difference Action Decoder (LDAD). Unlike inverse decoders that infer actions from concatenated endpoint embeddings, LDAD reconstructs the executed action from the latent displacement between consecutive observations. This displacement-level supervision directly regularizes transition geometry: adjacent embeddings cannot collapse without losing action information, and different actions are encouraged to induce distinguishable latent changes for rollout-based planning. Delta-JEPA uses only latent prediction and action reconstruction, avoiding pixel reconstruction and distribution-matching regularizers. Across four visual continuous-control tasks, Delta-JEPA improves planning over JEPA-based and representation-learning world model baselines. Ablations show that displacement-based action decoding is consistently more effective than endpoint concatenation, and action-sensitivity analyses show clearer action-conditioned latent responses. These results indicate that supervising latent differences is a simple and effective mechanism for collapse-resistant and action-sensitive world model learning.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 29 1

T-JEPA: Augmentation-Free Self-Supervised Learning for Tabular Data

Self-supervision is often used for pre-training to foster performance on a downstream task by constructing meaningful representations of samples. Self-supervised learning (SSL) generally involves generating different views of the same sample and thus requires data augmentations that are challenging to construct for tabular data. This constitutes one of the main challenges of self-supervision for structured data. In the present work, we propose a novel augmentation-free SSL method for tabular data. Our approach, T-JEPA, relies on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and is akin to mask reconstruction in the latent space. It involves predicting the latent representation of one subset of features from the latent representation of a different subset within the same sample, thereby learning rich representations without augmentations. We use our method as a pre-training technique and train several deep classifiers on the obtained representation. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both classification and regression tasks, outperforming models trained directly on samples in their original data space. Moreover, T-JEPA enables some methods to consistently outperform or match the performance of traditional methods likes Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. To understand why, we extensively characterize the obtained representations and show that T-JEPA effectively identifies relevant features for downstream tasks without access to the labels. Additionally, we introduce regularization tokens, a novel regularization method critical for training of JEPA-based models on structured data.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

Sub-JEPA: Subspace Gaussian Regularization for Stable End-to-End World Models

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a simpleframework for learning world models by predicting future latent representations.However, JEPA training is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff.Without sufficient structural constraints, excessive representationalvariance causes the model to collapse to trivial solutions.The recent LeWorldModel (LeWM) shows that this issue can be alleviated bysimply constraining latent embeddings with an isotropic Gaussian prior.However, latent representations inherently lie on low-dimensional manifoldswithin a high-dimensional ambient space, and enforcing an isotropic Gaussianprior directly in this ambient space introduces an overly strong bias.In this work, we propose ame, which seeks a favorable operatingpoint on the bias-variance frontier by applying Gaussian constraints inmultiple random subspaces rather than in the originalembedding space.This design relaxes the global constraint while preserving itsanti-collapse effect, leading to a better balance between trainingstability and representation flexibility.Extensive experiments across fourcontinuous-control environments demonstrate that consistentlyoutperforms LeWM with very clear margins.Our method is simple yet effective, and serves as a strong baseline for future JEPA-based world model research.fdefinedeeemodeThe code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/Sub-JEPA.

FlexiWorld: Learning and Planning via Flexible Action Chunks Across Multiple Time Scales

Latent world models predict future states for goal-directed planning using action chunks spanning multiple primitive steps. Existing methods typically use fixed-length chunks and either omit goal-conditioned action generation or limit their supervision to short goal spans. We introduce FlexiWorld, a JEPA-based world model that combines mixed-span goal supervision with variable-length action chunks to improve long-horizon control. During training, we sample varying goal spans and randomly partition the actions into variable-length chunks. We jointly train the world model with a causal action encoder that embeds variable-length chunks and an autoregressive actor that generates primitive actions sequentially. Student Forcing reduces exposure bias by training on generated action prefixes. For planning, Actor-Residual Cross-Entropy Method (ARCEM) combines action-residual search with within-chunk autoregressive feedback and chunk-boundary latent prediction. Across four benchmarks and goal distances, FlexiWorld with ARCEM achieves 89.29% mean success, compared with 83.98% for the strongest baseline. PushT ablations show improved direct control from mixed-span supervision, variable-length chunks, and Student Forcing. Without retraining, FlexiWorld supports different planning chunk lengths: longer chunks accelerate ARCEM by approximately 1.3times on average while maintaining comparable average success.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 27

Speaking in Words, Thinking in Logic: A Dual-Process Framework in QA Systems

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced question-answering (QA) capabilities, particularly in open-domain contexts. However, in closed-domain scenarios such as education, healthcare, and law, users demand not only accurate answers but also transparent reasoning and explainable decision-making processes. While neural-symbolic (NeSy) frameworks have emerged as a promising solution, leveraging LLMs for natural language understanding and symbolic systems for formal reasoning, existing approaches often rely on large-scale models and exhibit inefficiencies in translating natural language into formal logic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce Text-JEPA (Text-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture), a lightweight yet effective framework for converting natural language into first-order logic (NL2FOL). Drawing inspiration from dual-system cognitive theory, Text-JEPA emulates System 1 by efficiently generating logic representations, while the Z3 solver operates as System 2, enabling robust logical inference. To rigorously evaluate the NL2FOL-to-reasoning pipeline, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework comprising three custom metrics: conversion score, reasoning score, and Spearman rho score, which collectively capture the quality of logical translation and its downstream impact on reasoning accuracy. Empirical results on domain-specific datasets demonstrate that Text-JEPA achieves competitive performance with significantly lower computational overhead compared to larger LLM-based systems. Our findings highlight the potential of structured, interpretable reasoning frameworks for building efficient and explainable QA systems in specialized domains.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 27, 2025

Is the Reversal Curse a Binding Problem? Uncovering Limitations of Transformers from a Basic Generalization Failure

Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs exhibit a basic generalization failure known as the Reversal Curse, where they struggle to learn reversible factual associations. Understanding why this occurs could help identify weaknesses in current models and advance their generalization and robustness. In this paper, we conjecture that the Reversal Curse in LLMs is a manifestation of the long-standing binding problem in cognitive science, neuroscience and AI. Specifically, we identify two primary causes of the Reversal Curse stemming from transformers' limitations in conceptual binding: the inconsistency and entanglements of concept representations. We perform a series of experiments that support these conjectures. Our exploration leads to a model design based on JEPA (Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture) that for the first time breaks the Reversal Curse without side-stepping it with specialized data augmentation or non-causal masking, and moreover, generalization could be further improved by incorporating special memory layers that support disentangled concept representations. We demonstrate that the skill of reversal unlocks a new kind of memory integration that enables models to solve large-scale arithmetic reasoning problems via parametric forward-chaining, outperforming frontier LLMs based on non-parametric memory and prolonged explicit reasoning.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

DSeq-JEPA: Discriminative Sequential Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA) learns visual representations by predicting latent embeddings of masked regions from visible context. However, it treats all regions uniformly and independently, lacking an explicit notion of where or in what order predictions should be made. Inspired by human visual perception, which deploys attention selectively and sequentially from the most informative to secondary regions, we propose DSeq-JEPA, a Discriminative Sequential Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture that bridges predictive and autoregressive self-supervised learning, integrating JEPA-style latent prediction with GPT-style sequential reasoning. Specifically, DSeq-JEPA (i) first identifies primary discriminative regions based on a transformer-derived saliency map, emphasizing the distribution of visual importance, and then (ii) predicts subsequent regions in this discriminative order, progressively forming a curriculum-like semantic progression from primary to secondary cues -- a form of GPT-style pre-training. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including image classification (ImageNet), fine-grained visual categorization (iNaturalist21, CUB-200-2011, Stanford-Cars), detection and segmentation (MS-COCO, ADE20K), and low-level reasoning tasks (Clevr/Count, Clevr/Dist), demonstrate that DSeq-JEPA consistently focuses on more discriminative and generalizable representations than I-JEPA variants. Project page: https://github.com/SkyShunsuke/DSeq-JEPA.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

Auto-JEPA: A Latent World Model of Continuous Intent for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Existing autonomous-driving world models typically perform dense prediction of future videos, occupancy states, BEV representations, or agent motion. We argue that planning need not reconstruct the complete future world, but only focus on scene features that affect future ego action. Based on this perspective, we propose Auto-JEPA, an action-oriented latent world model that learns continuous future driving intent through joint-embedding prediction. Given visual observations, egomotion history, and navigation commands, Auto-JEPA predicts an intent embedding aligned with the latent representation of the future ego trajectory. The predicted intent retrieves executable trajectories from a fixed trajectory memory, which are then ranked by a scene-conditioned candidate selection module. Auto-JEPA keeps the visual encoder frozen, requires no explicit perception annotations, and uses no learned trajectory generator. By optimizing only task-specific modules for trajectory representation, intent prediction, and candidate selection, Auto-JEPA achieves 91.3 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 89.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2. Semantic occlusion experiments show that masking dynamic-agent regions induces an average intent change 2.97x that of equal-area random masking. Moreover, occluding vehicles that affect future driving substantially changes the predicted intent and selected trajectory, whereas both remain essentially unchanged when non-influential vehicles are occluded. These results show that future-intent prediction encourages the model to focus on planning-relevant visual features and supports high-quality planning without dense future-world modeling.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 30

PDE-JEPA: Predictive Representation Learning of Latent Dynamics Modeling for Parametric PDEs

Physical trajectories contain more than snapshots of a system: they also reveal how its states evolve under governing conditions. However, representation learning for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) has largely relied on reconstruction-based objectives that emphasize recovering observed physical fields. In this paper, we investigate predictive representation pretraining as an alternative to reconstruction-based learning. We find that predictive representations preserve rich physical information, yet this advantage alone does not ensure accurate field evolution. Based on these observations, we introduce PDE-JEPA for parametric PDE dynamics. Specifically, we first train an encoder using a masked-latent prediction to capture the underlying regularities of PDE dynamics. To explicitly adapt the pretrained representation toward a more dynamics-aligned state space, we then introduce a geometry projector that aligns latent trajectory geometry with the evolution geometry of physical fields. Finally, building on this geometry-aligned latent space, we further develop a physics-structured latent predictor that decomposes the dynamics into parameter-independent evolution and parameter-dependent response components. Extensive experiments on nine widely used PDE benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by an average of 33.4\% in-distribution, while achieving an average improvement of 51.4\% when extrapolating to unseen governing parameters. The project page is available https://tanpig-x.github.io/PDE-JEPA/{here}.

A Lightweight Library for Energy-Based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures

We present EB-JEPA, an open-source library for learning representations and world models using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs). JEPAs learn to predict in representation space rather than pixel space, avoiding the pitfalls of generative modeling while capturing semantically meaningful features suitable for downstream tasks. Our library provides modular, self-contained implementations that illustrate how representation learning techniques developed for image-level self-supervised learning can transfer to video, where temporal dynamics add complexity, and ultimately to action-conditioned world models, where the model must additionally learn to predict the effects of control inputs. Each example is designed for single-GPU training within a few hours, making energy-based self-supervised learning accessible for research and education. We provide ablations of JEA components on CIFAR-10. Probing these representations yields 91% accuracy, indicating that the model learns useful features. Extending to video, we include a multi-step prediction example on Moving MNIST that demonstrates how the same principles scale to temporal modeling. Finally, we show how these representations can drive action-conditioned world models, achieving a 97% planning success rate on the Two Rooms navigation task. Comprehensive ablations reveal the critical importance of each regularization component for preventing representation collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/eb_jepa.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 3

VISReg: Variance-Invariance-Sketching Regularization for JEPA training

Self-supervised learning methods prevent embedding collapse via modeling heuristics or explicit regularization of the embedding space. Among the latter, VICReg decomposes regularization into variance and covariance objectives, offering flexibility and interpretability. However, covariance captures only second-order statistics -- encouraging decorrelation but failing to enforce the full distributional shape needed for stable training. Sketching-based methods such as SIGReg address this by aligning embeddings to an isotropic Gaussian, but lack flexibility and suffer from vanishing gradients under collapse. We propose Variance-Invariance-Sketching Regularization (VISReg), which replaces covariance with a Sliced-Wasserstein-based sketching objective that enforces full distributional shape, while retaining a variance term for scale control. By decoupling scale and shape, VISReg combines VICReg's flexibility with the distributional rigor of sketching methods, providing robust gradients even under collapse. We show that VISReg scales linearly, outperforms existing regularization on low-quality datasets, and is resilient to long-tailed and low-rank regimes. Pre-trained on ImageNet-1K, VISReg achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution datasets. Pre-trained on ImageNet-22K, it matches DINOv2's OOD performance despite the latter using 10x more data (LVD-142M). Project and code: https://haiyuwu.github.io/visreg.

  • 3 authors
·
May 31

Slot-JEPA: Object-Structured Prediction Interfaces for Latent World Models

As a prototypical latent world model, Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide strong semantic representations. However, dense patch representations expose a redundant interface to downstream predictors, which must implicitly infer spatial organization and temporal correspondence, presenting three challenges. First, object information is distributed across patches, forcing each downstream predictor to redundantly recover object structure that could otherwise be reused across tasks before modeling interactions. Second, the lack of explicit entity correspondence across time makes historical transitions expensive, restricting the predictor's flexibility in utilizing context. Third, without explicit transport structure, existing JEPA models typically use pointwise l1/l2 distances, which are insensitive to spatial displacement when predicted and goal supports are largely disjoint. We propose the Slot-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (Slot-JEPA), which decomposes dense representations into stable semantic slots and time-varying spatial masks. Pretrained once and frozen downstream, this decomposition exposes a reusable object-structured interface. Building on it, our Transition Memory Predictor (TMP) stores visual transitions as compact masks and retrieves useful context using statistics of corresponding slots. Its two branches separate slot-specific dynamics from shared cross-slot dynamics. We further use Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) to supervise mask prediction and evaluate candidate plans by transporting mass between aligned predicted and goal masks, providing a signal better aligned with spatial progress. Across seven visual-understanding benchmarks, the slot-reconstructed features remain transferable. Slot-JEPA also improves goal-conditioned planning across six planar environments and four robotic arm planning tasks on the REALM-JEPA benchmark.

Qantara: Bridge-Flow Training for Multi-Paradigm JEPA Inference

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) underpin a growing family of latent world models for control from raw pixels. Published JEPA world models for pixel-based control (PLDM, DINO-WM, LeWM, V-JEPA-2-AC) each commit at training time to a single inference paradigm, trajectory optimisation in a learned dynamics model, so a checkpoint trained to plan cannot be read off as a policy without retraining. Deferring that choice to inference would let the constraints that bind at deployment, per-step latency and whether a goal observation can be supplied, pick the path. We present Qantara, an end-to-end JEPA of about 21M parameters whose joint training objective pairs a Brownian-bridge interpolant between consecutive clean latents on the state axis with noise-to-data flow matching on the action axis. One checkpoint serves three inference paradigms without retraining: latent planning, behaviour-cloning action sampling, and a video-inverse composition that predicts the next latent without action conditioning, then recovers the action bridging the two. Training samples the two noise levels along the edges of the (action-noise, state-noise) square, one edge per inference dispatch, so each path is trained where it is queried. Replacing that sampler with uniform sampling over the square at matched compute drops Push-T planning from 90.1 to 53.3 success rate (SR). On the LeWM control suite at a matched 10-epoch budget, Qantara averages 91.2 SR over the four environments and reaches 93.7 on OGBench-Cube, +7.7 over DINO-WM and +17.0 over LeWM, each measured against the stronger of that baseline's published score and our retrain of it. From the same weights the two goal-blind paths, which receive no goal image, reach 82.1-83.2 SR on Push-T and 70.8-72.8 on Cube at roughly 15-65x lower inference cost, and fall to near-noise on Reacher, whose released training corpus comes from a random policy.

t-tech T-Tech
·
Oct 9

MIDI-RAE-JEPA: Hierarchical Representation Learning and Generation for Symbolic Music

Rich internal representations of musical structure are essential for music understanding tasks such as machine-assisted music co-writing, yet self-supervised approaches for symbolic music representation remain underexplored, particularly those that encode the hierarchical multiscale nature of musical structures. We present MIDI-RAE-JEPA, combining a pitch- and time-shift equivariance objective with LeJEPA and a Swin Transformer V2 encoder to learn such hierarchical representations of symbolic music encoded as piano roll images. The time-shift equivariance objective encourages the model to internalize temporal musical relationships. The encoder is trained purely on self-supervised objectives -- including a masked embedding predictor (MEP) -- with collapse prevented via SIGReg. A separate decoder trained on the frozen encoder embeddings achieves reconstruction F1 of 0.995, and a flow matching generative model conditioned on those embeddings produces generations that closely match the pitch register and rhythmic density of the conditioning excerpt, while mismatched conditioning yields unrelated but musically plausible output. Learned representations outperform a Haar scattering transform baseline on a downstream emotion classification task, and embedding distances increase monotonically with pitch and time shift magnitude, confirming measurable equivariance. These results suggest that equivariance-based SSL objectives, combined with sufficient fine-level encoder capacity, provide a viable path toward semantically rich, generatively useful representations of symbolic music.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 15

Predictive Closure: A Set-Level Characterization of JEPA's Feature Selection

In joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPA), an encoder and a predictor are trained together to produce a representation that minimizes the error in predicting the representation of the next observation. Because the representations of both the current and the next observation are learned, it is unclear which features they will include. Earlier characterizations describe the features JEPA selects in terms of their individual predictability, raising the concern that unpredictable features, like a traffic light, will not be encoded into the representation. However, the prediction error is also affected by the relationships between features, e.g., the light's color helps predict whether the traffic will stop. We propose the predictive closure characterization, which accounts for these relationships. Based on a reformulation of the JEPA training objective, we show that selection depends on properties of feature sets. This view agrees with earlier works when features evolve independently, but makes new predictions when they do not, for instance that a feature like the traffic light can still be retained. We test this characterization in controlled experiments, which show that unpredictable features can become better represented when they help predict other features, and that changing one feature's predictive relationships can affect how well others are represented. We also demonstrate implications for steering feature selection: targeting one feature with an auxiliary objective, or supplying it to the predictor as side information, can strengthen the representation of another feature whose future values it helps predict, so steering can be indirect.

JEPA-Anything: Learning Predictive Models across Different Worlds

World modeling enables intelligence to anticipate consequences, guide interventions, and learn from interaction. Yet predictive models remain domain-specific: can a common learning principle support world modeling across radically different systems? We introduce JEPA-Anything, a domain-agnostic framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization (OPF). Extending joint-embedding predictive architectures, OPF decomposes latent targets into complementary factors, learns them through dedicated pathways, and recombines them within a shared predictive design. We evaluate JEPA-Anything across seven domains: vision, biology, clinical trajectories, control, molecular dynamics, physical fields, and weather. Experiments span representation learning, intervention prediction, out-of-distribution generalization, and long-horizon dynamics, including 10 matched dynamics tasks, forecasting of over 1,000 clinical events, and 100-step molecular rollouts across four systems. Against matched JEPA baselines, JEPA-Anything improves reported metrics on all 10 dynamics tasks and reduces single-intervention prediction error on Interventional Pong by 34.8%. It achieves the lowest one-step and 100-step molecular errors among compared methods in all four systems. Beyond prediction, a factor-nominated biological intervention receives experimental support in cell co-cultures, patient-derived organoids, tumor fragments, and mice; latent orbital modes recover the Keplerian scaling exponent with a fitted slope of -1.4991. These results support a common factorized predictive principle across heterogeneous worlds, connecting world modeling with intervention and experimentally grounded scientific discovery. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/JEPA-Anything

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 16 4

SCOUT: Sim-to-Real Text-Based Person Retrieval by Embedding-Space Prediction over Frozen Video Features

Text-based person retrieval under a sim-to-real gap (synthetic training data, a real-image gallery) is usually tackled with costly fine-tuned cross-encoders. We ask whether a frozen-encoder system can compete. We present SCOUT, which casts cross-modal retrieval as prediction in embedding space. A trainable predictor maps the patch tokens of a frozen video encoder into the embedding space of a frozen text encoder under a bidirectional InfoNCE objective, and no encoder is fine-tuned in the base model. The video encoder is V-JEPA, the text encoder is EmbeddingGemma, and the predictor is initialized from a Qwen3.5-0.8B decoder. We make three findings. First, the best frozen text encoder is simply the one whose geometry best matches the video features. A training-free alignment score ranks three candidate text encoders in the same order as their retrieval accuracy on our held-out split (Spearman ρ= 1.0); a fourth, LLM-based encoder shows the rule is metric-dependent, holding for a neighborhood-overlap score (ρ= 0.8) but not for a linear probe (ρ= -0.2). Second, two precision-targeted levers, parameter-efficient ExPLoRA adaptation of the video encoder and a training-free attribute-decomposed reranker built on a vision-language model, improve the top-rank precision that otherwise limits the frozen system, adding 2.2 points of leaderboard R@1. Third, a local-versus-public calibration study explains which interventions transfer to the real domain. On AI City Challenge 2026 Track 4 the full retrieve-fuse-rerank system reaches 84.25 mAP@10 on the final leaderboard, while a single frozen model submitted alone reaches 60.63. Our trained components cost about 95 GPU-hours. CMP, the dataset authors' fine-tuned cross-encoder that trains for sixteen GPU-days, is one fusion member of the full system, not an alternative. Code and annotations: https://github.com/abtraore/SCOUT-ECCV

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15

Tactile-JEPA: Topology-Aware Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Distributed Tactile Sensors

Tactile sensing is an essential modality for robots performing contact-rich, dexterous manipulation, particularly under visual occlusion. While pre-trained image encoders are standard in robot learning pipelines, tactile encoders are still commonly trained from scratch from raw, noisy signals, which might limit their expressivity. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches focus predominantly on vision-based tactile sensors, leaving distributed electronic skins largely unaddressed. These sensors, however, have a distinctive property: their sensing elements are sparse and irregularly arranged over the surface they cover, which makes direct reuse of visual SSL methods suboptimal. We present Tactile-JEPA, an efficient self-supervised pre-training method that uses the spatial arrangement of tactile sensors to learn topology-aware representations. Specifically, it is trained to predict the embeddings of masked sensing elements from the unmasked remainder, using the sensor connectivity graph to guide spatial masking. Our analysis shows that effective tactile representations require capturing both local contact details and the global state of the tactile surface, which we achieve through dual-scale masking. Across three diverse datasets spanning magnetic and piezoresistive sensors, different robot embodiments, and single- and paired-sensor configurations, Tactile-JEPA reduces force estimation error by 6.3% and in-hand orientation error by 20.8% over the prior state-of-the-art, with consistent gains in other downstream applications, including policy learning. Overall, our results demonstrate that the benefit of tactile sensing depends critically on the quality of encoder pre-training, a problem which Tactile-JEPA addresses directly. Code is available at https://github.com/E-Kovtun/tactile.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 20 2

V-JEPA Hand: Simple, Accurate and Fast 3D Hand and Camera Trajectory Recovery from Egocentric Videos

Egocentric video supports diverse applications, including robot learning, augmented reality, and human activity understanding. Recovering metric 3D hand trajectories from such video requires estimating both hand motion and camera egomotion to express the hands in a consistent reference frame. Many existing pipelines recover hand and camera motion in separate stages, combining hand detection, hand reconstruction, camera tracking, and trajectory refinement. We present V-JEPA Hand, a simple feed-forward video model that jointly reconstructs bilateral hand motion and camera motion from egocentric clips. It uses a self-supervised V-JEPA 2.1 encoder to extract spatio-temporal features from full-frame video and a query-based predictor to decode these features into per-frame hand poses, hand presence, and camera motion. We use the predicted camera motion to express the hand trajectories in a common world frame. The model accepts known focal lengths or predicts them when unavailable. It reconstructs each clip in a single forward pass. We train both components end to end in a single stage on a mixture of diverse pseudo-labelled videos and high-precision 3D annotations. A single model achieves the lowest coverage-aware mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) among comparable baselines on ARCTIC, HOT3D, and EgoStandard. It also yields lower world-frame trajectory errors than the compared SLAM-based pipelines. Ablations support the benefits of video pretraining, temporal context, and mixed supervision. V-JEPA Hand achieves a forward-pass throughput of 93.4 FPS on a single RTX A6000. Project page: https://qft-333.github.io/V-JEPA-Hand-Page/.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 18

MIND-V: Hierarchical Video Generation for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment

Embodied imitation learning is constrained by the scarcity of diverse, long-horizon robotic manipulation data. Existing video generation models for this domain are limited to synthesizing short clips of simple actions and often rely on manually defined trajectories. To this end, we introduce MIND-V, a hierarchical framework designed to synthesize physically plausible and logically coherent videos of long-horizon robotic manipulation. Inspired by cognitive science, MIND-V bridges high-level reasoning with pixel-level synthesis through three core components: a Semantic Reasoning Hub (SRH) that leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for task planning; a Behavioral Semantic Bridge (BSB) that translates abstract instructions into domain-invariant representations; and a Motor Video Generator (MVG) for conditional video rendering. MIND-V employs Staged Visual Future Rollouts, a test-time optimization strategy to enhance long-horizon robustness. To align the generated videos with physical laws, we introduce a GRPO reinforcement learning post-training phase guided by a novel Physical Foresight Coherence (PFC) reward. PFC leverages the V-JEPA world model to enforce physical plausibility by aligning the predicted and actual dynamic evolutions in the feature space. MIND-V demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in long-horizon robotic manipulation video generation, establishing a scalable and controllable paradigm for embodied data synthesis.

Tsinghua Tsinghua University
·
Dec 6, 2025 2

VL-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-language

We introduce VL-JEPA, a vision-language model built on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Instead of autoregressively generating tokens as in classical VLMs, VL-JEPA predicts continuous embeddings of the target texts. By learning in an abstract representation space, the model focuses on task-relevant semantics while abstracting away surface-level linguistic variability. In a strictly controlled comparison against standard token-space VLM training with the same vision encoder and training data, VL-JEPA achieves stronger performance while having 50% fewer trainable parameters. At inference time, a lightweight text decoder is invoked only when needed to translate VL-JEPA predicted embeddings into text. We show that VL-JEPA natively supports selective decoding that reduces the number of decoding operations by 2.85x while maintaining similar performance compared to non-adaptive uniform decoding. Beyond generation, the VL-JEPA's embedding space naturally supports open-vocabulary classification, text-to-video retrieval, and discriminative VQA without any architecture modification. On eight video classification and eight video retrieval datasets, the average performance VL-JEPA surpasses that of CLIP, SigLIP2, and Perception Encoder. At the same time, the model achieves comparable performance as classical VLMs (InstructBLIP, QwenVL) on four VQA datasets: GQA, TallyQA, POPE and POPEv2, despite only having 1.6B parameters.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025 6

V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

meta-llama Meta Llama
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Mar 15 2

Orthogonal JEPA: Factorized Predictive States for Latent World Models

World models construct latent states that support prediction, planning, and reasoning about an underlying system. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) offer a direct way to learn such states by predicting targets in representation space instead of reconstructing every detail of the observation. Standard JEPAs, however, organize all predictable content through one target embedding and one prediction pathway. In complex systems, this monolithic state can allocate redundant capacity to dominant signals while providing weak or conflicting gradients to less dominant predictive structure. We introduce \method, a latent world-modeling framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization. Learned basis matrices analyze each target state into multiple components, and a dedicated prediction branch estimates each component from a shared context representation. Predictive regression preserves the factor magnitudes required for state synthesis, an orthogonality objective discourages repeated directions, factor-activity regularization maintains variation in projected targets, and online variance regularization discourages coordinate-wise encoder collapse. Predicted components are synthesized into a complete latent state that can be used by a readout, decoder, planner, or autoregressive rollout. The same predictive-state mechanism applies when the target is temporally future, spatially hidden, or another partial observation of the same system. Experiments on controlled vision, single-cell transcriptomics, longitudinal health records, continuous control, and molecular dynamics evaluate representation quality, forecasting, planning, and long-horizon stability.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 20

JEPA-VLA: Video Predictive Embedding is Needed for VLA Models

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models built upon pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved significant improvements in robotic manipulation. However, current VLAs still suffer from low sample efficiency and limited generalization. This paper argues that these limitations are closely tied to an overlooked component, pretrained visual representation, which offers insufficient knowledge on both aspects of environment understanding and policy prior. Through an in-depth analysis, we find that commonly used visual representations in VLAs, whether pretrained via language-image contrastive learning or image-based self-supervised learning, remain inadequate at capturing crucial, task-relevant environment information and at inducing effective policy priors, i.e., anticipatory knowledge of how the environment evolves under successful task execution. In contrast, we discover that predictive embeddings pretrained on videos, in particular V-JEPA 2, are adept at flexibly discarding unpredictable environment factors and encoding task-relevant temporal dynamics, thereby effectively compensating for key shortcomings of existing visual representations in VLAs. Building on these observations, we introduce JEPA-VLA, a simple yet effective approach that adaptively integrates predictive embeddings into existing VLAs. Our experiments demonstrate that JEPA-VLA yields substantial performance gains across a range of benchmarks, including LIBERO, LIBERO-plus, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot tasks.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 11

Rethinking JEPA: Compute-Efficient Video SSL with Frozen Teachers

Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (V-JEPA) learn generalizable off-the-shelf video representation by predicting masked regions in latent space with an exponential moving average (EMA)-updated teacher. While EMA prevents representation collapse, it complicates scalable model selection and couples teacher and student architectures. We revisit masked-latent prediction and show that a frozen teacher suffices. Concretely, we (i) train a target encoder with a simple pixel-reconstruction objective under V-JEPA masking, then (ii) freeze it and train a student to predict the teacher's latents on masked regions. This leads to a two-stage, unregularized scheme that we refer to as SALT (Static-teacher Asymmetric Latent Training). SALT decouples optimization into pixel reconstruction (teacher) and masked latent prediction (student), increasing transparency, efficiency, and scalability while preserving the ability of representation to generalize under frozen evaluation. Empirically, our student models outperform recently proposed V-JEPA 2 encoders under frozen backbone evaluation across diverse benchmarks. They are also more compute-optimal: at matched pretraining FLOPs, our method achieves higher probing accuracy, and its scaling curves dominate V-JEPA's accuracy-FLOPs Pareto frontier. Finally, we find that student quality is remarkably robust to teacher quality: high-performing students emerge even with small, sub-optimal teachers. This points to a compute budget allocation that should overwhelmingly favor the student. These results position SALT as a simple, scalable, and compute-efficient alternative to EMA-based self-distillation for video representation learning.

apple Apple
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Sep 29, 2025 2

TD-JEPA: Latent-predictive Representations for Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning

Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define auxiliary losses for a variety of settings, including reward-based and unsupervised RL, behavior cloning, and world modeling. While existing methods are typically limited to single-task learning, one-step prediction, or on-policy trajectory data, we show that temporal difference (TD) learning enables learning representations predictive of long-term latent dynamics across multiple policies from offline, reward-free transitions. Building on this, we introduce TD-JEPA, which leverages TD-based latent-predictive representations into unsupervised RL. TD-JEPA trains explicit state and task encoders, a policy-conditioned multi-step predictor, and a set of parameterized policies directly in latent space. This enables zero-shot optimization of any reward function at test time. Theoretically, we show that an idealized variant of TD-JEPA avoids collapse with proper initialization, and learns encoders that capture a low-rank factorization of long-term policy dynamics, while the predictor recovers their successor features in latent space. Empirically, TD-JEPA matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation tasks across 13 datasets in ExoRL and OGBench, especially in the challenging setting of zero-shot RL from pixels.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 1, 2025

P-JEPA: Procedural Video Representation Learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture

The increasing maturity of embodied AI platforms has driven a growing interest in procedural video representation learning to support intelligent assistance systems for complex, multi-step tasks. Leveraging large-scale latent predictive training, video foundation models capture video dynamics, enabling downstream tasks such as activity understanding, spatiotemporal localization, and predictive control. However, procedural videos include actions with long-range dependencies that these models do not support, due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Distinct actions, for example, may be visually similar despite appearing at different points in the procedure, such as turning the stove on versus off. Here, we propose a backbone-agnostic approach that learns long-duration video representations by reducing the problem to a dense, frame-aligned action space and predicting pooled masked latent vectors. This approach allows our Procedural Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (P-JEPA) to ingest videos over 30 minutes long, enabling effective long-form understanding of procedural steps. We evaluate P-JEPA using features extracted with VJEPA2.1, TSM, and I3D over the EgoExo4D, EgoProceL, and Assembly101 datasets, finding that it consistently improves linear separability, streaming inference, and temporal action segmentation performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on EgoExo4D fine-grained action classification while using an order of magnitude fewer parameters than LLM-based methods and running in real time.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 21

Revisiting Energy-based Tabular Anomaly Detection: Energy and Reconstruction are Complementary

Tabular anomaly detection is dominated by classical density-proxy methods (Isolation Forest, OCSVM, LOF), reconstruction-based detectors (Autoencoders, VAEs), and modern non-parametric scorers (COPOD, ECOD, Deep SVDD), all of which approximate the inlier distribution only indirectly; explicit energy-based models are largely absent. Motivated by the recent revival of EBMs in deep learning (e.g., Energy-Based Transformers, JEPA), we revisit the classical Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) for this task and hypothesize that its mean-field energy combines more effectively with a reconstruction-based score than same-lineage pairs do. We evaluate a two-hidden-layer DBM on two tabular benchmarks spanning distinct domains (UCI Bank Marketing and NSL-KDD) against eight classical and modern baselines across twenty random seeds. The DBM mean-field energy matches the strongest baseline (the Autoencoder) on Bank Marketing and statistically beats it on NSL-KDD, while significantly outperforming the remaining seven on both datasets. When fused with the Autoencoder via rank fusion, the DBM energy yields a statistically significant improvement on both datasets (AUROC=+0.014, p<0.01 on Bank Marketing; +0.002, p<0.001 on NSL-KDD); every non-DBM-derived base model instead fails to improve or significantly degrades the AE-paired ensemble. Our position is that classical EBMs, exemplified by the DBM, deserve a place in the tabular anomaly detection toolbox as a non-redundant complementary view to the reconstruction-based scores that dominate current practice.

  • 1 authors
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Aug 13

Clin-JEPA: A Multi-Phase Co-Training Framework for Joint-Embedding Predictive Pretraining on EHR Patient Trajectories

We present Clin-JEPA, a multi-phase co-training framework for joint-embedding predictive (JEPA) pretraining on EHR patient trajectories. JEPA architectures have enabled latent-space planning in robotics and high-quality representation learning in vision, but extending the paradigm to EHR data -- to obtain a single backbone that simultaneously forecasts patient trajectories and serves diverse downstream risk-prediction tasks without per-task fine-tuning -- remains an open challenge. Existing JEPA frameworks either discard the predictor after pretraining (I-JEPA, V-JEPA) or train it on a frozen pretrained encoder (V-JEPA 2-AC), leaving the encoder unaware of the rollout signal that the retained predictor must use at inference; co-training the encoder and predictor under a shared JEPA prediction objective would supply this grounding, but naïve co-training is unstable, with representation collapse and online/target drift causing autoregressive rollout to diverge. Clin-JEPA's five-phase pretraining curriculum -- predictor warmup, joint refinement, EMA target alignment, hard sync, and predictor finalization -- addresses each failure mode by phase, stably co-training a Qwen3-8B-based encoder and a 92M-parameter latent trajectory predictor. On MIMIC-IV ICU data, three independent evaluations support the framework: (1) latent ell_1 rollout drift uniquely converges (-15.7%) over 48-hour horizons while baselines and ablations diverge (+3% to +4951%); (2) the encoder learns a clinically discriminative latent geometry (deteriorating-patient cohorts displace 4.83times further than stable patients in latent space, vs leq2.62times for baseline encoders); (3) a single backbone outperforms strong tabular and sequence baselines on multi-task downstream evaluation. Clin-JEPA achieves mean AUROC 0.851 on ICareFM EEP and 0.883 on 8 binary risk tasks (+0.038 and +0.041 vs baseline average).

  • 13 authors
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Jul 3

Does Latent Planning Survive Point Clouds? Action-Conditioned JEPA World Models for Geometric Observations and Goals

Latent action world models let agents plan new behaviors at test time by predicting how actions change the environment, and joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) do so by forecasting future latent states rather than pixels. Yet nearly all such models see the world through a camera, even though robotic manipulation is fundamentally geometric: in robotics goals for manipulation are traditionally specified by target object poses, not by images of the object once placed. We ask whether latent planning survives a shift from appearance to geometry, on the observation side as well as on the goal specifications side. To answer this, we extend the stable-worldmodel evaluation platform with simulated LiDAR-style raycast point clouds as a new sensor modality, and adapt three JEPA designs to point clouds: a frozen-encoder model built on Utonia features, a distribution-prior model based on LeWM, and an action-sensitive model based on Delta-JEPA. We further introduce a goal-encoding mechanism that constructs the goal latent from the current latent and a 3D target pose, removing the need for goal images or goal point clouds. A comparative evaluation of the different anti-collapse mechanisms shows that point-cloud world models can match their image-based counterparts, demonstrating that the modality shift from appearance to geometry is achievable. All models are released as open weights with open-source training and inference code, to make world-model planning accessible for LiDAR-driven and pose-directed robotic tasks.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 27

Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Boosts ECG Classification Performance

Accurate diagnosis of heart arrhythmias requires the interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECG), which capture the electrical activity of the heart. Automating this process through machine learning is challenging due to the need for large annotated datasets, which are difficult and costly to collect. To address this issue, transfer learning is often employed, where models are pre-trained on large datasets and fine-tuned for specific ECG classification tasks with limited labeled data. Self-supervised learning has become a widely adopted pre-training method, enabling models to learn meaningful representations from unlabeled datasets. In this work, we explore the joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for self-supervised learning from ECG data. Unlike invariance-based methods, JEPA does not rely on hand-crafted data augmentations, and unlike generative methods, it predicts latent features rather than reconstructing input data. We create a large unsupervised pre-training dataset by combining ten public ECG databases, amounting to over one million records. We pre-train Vision Transformers using JEPA on this dataset and fine-tune them on various PTB-XL benchmarks. Our results show that JEPA outperforms existing invariance-based and generative approaches, achieving an AUC of 0.945 on the PTB-XL all statements task. JEPA consistently learns the highest quality representations, as demonstrated in linear evaluations, and proves advantageous for pre-training even in the absence of additional data.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 2, 2024

SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors

Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 22

TWLV-I: Analysis and Insights from Holistic Evaluation on Video Foundation Models

In this work, we discuss evaluating video foundation models in a fair and robust manner. Unlike language or image foundation models, many video foundation models are evaluated with differing parameters (such as sampling rate, number of frames, pretraining steps, etc.), making fair and robust comparisons challenging. Therefore, we present a carefully designed evaluation framework for measuring two core capabilities of video comprehension: appearance and motion understanding. Our findings reveal that existing video foundation models, whether text-supervised like UMT or InternVideo2, or self-supervised like V-JEPA, exhibit limitations in at least one of these capabilities. As an alternative, we introduce TWLV-I, a new video foundation model that constructs robust visual representations for both motion- and appearance-based videos. Based on the average top-1 accuracy of linear probing on five action recognition benchmarks, pretrained only on publicly accessible datasets, our model shows a 4.6%p improvement compared to V-JEPA (ViT-L) and a 7.7%p improvement compared to UMT (ViT-L). Even when compared to much larger models, our model demonstrates a 7.2%p improvement compared to DFN (ViT-H), a 2.7%p improvement compared to V-JEPA~(ViT-H) and a 2.8%p improvement compared to InternVideo2 (ViT-g). We provide embedding vectors obtained by TWLV-I from videos of several commonly used video benchmarks, along with evaluation source code that can directly utilize these embeddings. The code is available on "https://github.com/twelvelabs-io/video-embeddings-evaluation-framework".

  • 21 authors
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Aug 20, 2024 2

Latent evolving World Action Model

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model action generation and environment dynamics and are mostly built on pretrained Video Diffusion Models (VDMs). In VDM-based WAMs, observations are first encoded by a VAE, and the resulting compressed latents are then processed by large video diffusion backbones to extract effective features for action generation. However, this paradigm ties WAM performance and training cost to large-scale video generation pretraining, limiting WAM efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically investigate how visual representations affect action generation in WAMs. Our results show that predictive embeddings from Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) encoders better support action generation than compressed VAE latents, with I-JEPA performing best in our encoder comparison. Based on these findings, we propose LeWAM, which conditions action generation on JEPA embeddings and models environment evolution by predicting future embeddings in the same space, without relying on a video diffusion backbone. We further find that imitation learning matches demonstrated actions but does not distinguish better actions from worse ones, even though small action deviations can greatly affect task success. To address this limitation without additional environment interaction or the human oversight required for resets and safety, we introduce Demonstration-Guided DPO (DemoDPO), an offline preference refinement stage that derives preference supervision directly from demonstrations.With only 0.4B trainable parameters, LeWAM achieves an average success rate of 92.28\% on RoboTwin 2.0, comparable to that of state-of-the-art VLAs and WAMs, and maintains practical effectiveness on real-world manipulation tasks.

Laya: A LeJEPA Approach to EEG via Latent Prediction over Reconstruction

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used tool for studying brain function, with applications in clinical neuroscience, diagnosis, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Recent EEG foundation models trained on large unlabeled corpora aim to learn transferable representations, but their effectiveness remains unclear; reported improvements over smaller task-specific models are often modest, sensitive to downstream adaptation and fine-tuning strategies, and limited under linear probing. We hypothesize that one contributing factor is the reliance on signal reconstruction as the primary self-supervised learning (SSL) objective, which biases representations toward high-variance artifacts rather than task-relevant neural structure. To address this limitation, we explore an SSL paradigm based on Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), which learn by predicting latent representations instead of reconstructing raw signals. We introduce Laya, the first EEG foundation model based on LeJEPA. We show that latent prediction yields representations that encode semantic structure in EEG: Laya embeddings track clinically meaningful state changes such as seizure onset, are resilient to noise, and achieve the strongest mean clinical accuracy under frozen linear probing, with particular gains on tasks where relevant neural patterns are subtle and easily obscured by artifacts. Controlled ablations against matched MAE variants confirm that the choice of pretraining objective, rather than architecture or data, is the primary driver of these gains.

  • 5 authors
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May 6

EgoJEPA: Beyond Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation from Egocentric Videos

Egocentric human videos offer a scalable alternative to costly robot demonstra- tions, yet transferring their manipulation priors to robot control remains chal- lenging. The commonly adopted retargeting-based approaches convert human wrist and finger poses into embodiment-specific action commands through hand- crafted geometric mappings. However, such mappings require meticulous recal- ibration across different embodiments and risk propagating hand-tracking errors into downstream robot control pipelines. To this end, we propose EgoJEPA, a three-stage framework that learns embodiment-agnostic representations from ego- centric human videos without rule-based human-to-robot retargeting: 1) Human- action pre-training learns effect-aware latent actions through JEPA-style visual prediction conditioned on hand-motion differences; 2) Latent-action-based world modeling jointly predicts future visual dynamics and latent actions, which decou- ples human prior pre-training from robot-specific control parameterizations; 3) Embodiment-specific tuning adapts the pretrained model to diverse robots through lightweight action adapters. Experiments on five real-world manipulation tasks across three robot embodiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of EgoJEPA. It achieves a 74% average success rate under the out-of-domain evalu- ation, compared with 65% for the retargeting baseline, while reducing cumulative cross-embodiment wall-clock cost by 47.2%, from 743.2 to 392.7 hours.

  • 15 authors
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Oct 13

The JEPA Predictor: A Transferable Operator for Occluded Feature Completion

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) train a predictor jointly with their encoder, but downstream deployment discards the predictor and reads features from the encoder alone. The predictor is, by construction, a learned operator from visible-context features to features at masked positions, the structure a partial-view classifier needs. We show that this operator is portable across encoder families. We first establish that, at heavy mask, retaining the frozen predictor on a JEPA encoder substantially closes the accuracy gap against the strongest non-JEPA discriminative baselines. We then bolt the frozen predictors of I-JEPA and V-JEPA 2 onto four non-JEPA hosts (CLIP, DINOv3, DINOv2, MAE) through a single linear projection between feature spaces, fit in closed form on 500 ImageNet-1k images. Across both ImageNet-9 and Stanford Dogs and across three mask fractions, the lift over each host's masked-encoder baseline grows monotonically with the mask fraction K in every host-donor pair. CLIP paired with the I-JEPA predictor recovers most of the accuracy that masking removed on ImageNet-9 at heavy occlusion, and lifts fine-grained Stanford Dogs from 15.9% to 52.1% (+36 pp). The mechanism is identifiable: the projection pays a fixed cost on visible patches and the predictor provides a growing benefit on masked patches; the benefit dominates the heavy-occlusion regime. At low K on fine-grained classification the projection cost exceeds the benefit, defining the boundary where the linear bridge breaks down. The frozen JEPA predictor functions as a portable operator for occluded feature completion across encoder families, requiring no retraining of either model while fitting matched linear probes per mask fraction.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 1

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision--language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 23 2

UI-JEPA: Towards Active Perception of User Intent through Onscreen User Activity

Generating user intent from a sequence of user interface (UI) actions is a core challenge in comprehensive UI understanding. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in this area, but their demands for extensive model parameters, computing power, and high latency makes them impractical for scenarios requiring lightweight, on-device solutions with low latency or heightened privacy. Additionally, the lack of high-quality datasets has hindered the development of such lightweight models. To address these challenges, we propose UI-JEPA, a novel framework that employs masking strategies to learn abstract UI embeddings from unlabeled data through self-supervised learning, combined with an LLM decoder fine-tuned for user intent prediction. We also introduce two new UI-grounded multimodal datasets, "Intent in the Wild" (IIW) and "Intent in the Tame" (IIT), designed for few-shot and zero-shot UI understanding tasks. IIW consists of 1.7K videos across 219 intent categories, while IIT contains 914 videos across 10 categories. We establish the first baselines for these datasets, showing that representations learned using a JEPA-style objective, combined with an LLM decoder, can achieve user intent predictions that match the performance of state-of-the-art large MLLMs, but with significantly reduced annotation and deployment resources. Measured by intent similarity scores, UI-JEPA outperforms GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet by 10.0% and 7.2% respectively, averaged across two datasets. Notably, UI-JEPA accomplishes the performance with a 50.5x reduction in computational cost and a 6.6x improvement in latency in the IIW dataset. These results underscore the effectiveness of UI-JEPA, highlighting its potential for lightweight, high-performance UI understanding.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 6, 2024

ACT-JEPA: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Improves Policy Representation Learning

Learning efficient representations for decision-making policies is a challenge in imitation learning (IL). Current IL methods require expert demonstrations, which are expensive to collect. Consequently, they often have underdeveloped world models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers an alternative by allowing models to learn from diverse, unlabeled data, including failures. However, SSL methods often operate in raw input space, making them inefficient. In this work, we propose ACT-JEPA, a novel architecture that integrates IL and SSL to enhance policy representations. We train a policy to predict (1) action sequences and (2) abstract observation sequences. The first objective uses action chunking to improve action prediction and reduce compounding errors. The second objective extends this idea of chunking by predicting abstract observation sequences. We utilize Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture to predict in abstract representation space, allowing the model to filter out irrelevant details, improve efficiency, and develop a robust world model. Our experiments show that ACT-JEPA improves the quality of representations by learning temporal environment dynamics. Additionally, the model's ability to predict abstract observation sequences results in representations that effectively generalize to action sequence prediction. ACT-JEPA performs on par with established baselines across a range of decision-making tasks.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 24, 2025

CGM-JEPA: Learning Consistent Continuous Glucose Monitor Representations via Predictive Self-Supervised Pretraining

Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) can detect early metabolic subphenotypes (insulin resistance, IR; β-cell dysfunction), but population-scale deployment faces two coupled problems. First, the same physiological state appears through multiple views (CGM time series, venous OGTT, Glucodensity summaries), so single-view representations fail to transfer when deployment shifts the modality or setting. Second, baselines perform inconsistently across these shifts. Both problems point to one remedy: representations that abstract away from any single view to capture higher-level temporal and distributional structure. We propose CGM-JEPA, a self-supervised pretraining framework which predicts masked latent representations rather than raw values, yielding abstraction that transfers across modalities. X-CGM-JEPA adds a masked Glucodensity cross-view objective for complementary distributional information. We pretrain on sim389k unlabeled CGM readings from 228 subjects and evaluate on two clinical cohorts (N=27 and N=17 public-release subsets) across three regimes (cohort generalization, venous-to-CGM transfer, home CGM) under 20-iteration times 2-fold cross-validation. X-CGM-JEPA ranks first or second on AUROC for both endpoints across all three regimes while no baseline does, exceeding the strongest baseline by up to +6.5 pp in cohort generalization and +3.6 pp in venous-to-CGM transfer (paired Wilcoxon, p<0.001). Under modality shift, it matches mean AUROC while redistributing toward weaker subgroups (ethnicity AUROC gap shrinks 25-54%); on sparse in-domain venous data, the distributional view lifts label-aware clustering (ARI +39%, NMI +40%). Code and weights: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/CGM-JEPA

google Google
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Apr 30 2

Temporal-Distance JEPA: Plan-Aware Representation Learning for Latent World Model Predictive Control

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn world models by predicting in representation space rather than reconstructing pixels, making them a natural backbone for latent model predictive control from offline demonstration logs. JEPA-style training optimizes short-horizon latent prediction, whereas planning requires a multi-step ranking of imagined futures by goal progress. Prior JEPA planners often inherit that ranking from embedding geometry, typically latent Euclidean distance, which arises as a byproduct of representation learning rather than as a progress cost mined from the logs. We propose temporal-distance JEPA (TD-JEPA), which retains the LeWM encoder--predictor backbone and mines a directed temporal cost from reward-free trajectories: same-trajectory step order supplies positive targets, cross-trajectory pairs act as heuristic negatives, and a rollout-consistency term matches the planner horizon. The mined supervision serves two roles: as the deployed planning cost when progress is topological, and as a representation signal that improves Euclidean planning when contact geometry dominates. Under locked evaluation, deploying the mined cost raises Two-Room success to 100.0% versus LeWM's 97.4%, while shared Euclidean planning on the same temporally trained checkpoint raises OGB-Cube by 14.2 points over LeWM and improves Push-T. Against LeWM and the concurrent RC-aux baseline under locked evaluation, TD-JEPA matches or exceeds both methods on every environment. Ablations show that the directed head, cross-trajectory negatives, and rollout consistency each contribute. TD-JEPA narrows the train--plan gap for JEPA world-model planners by discovering temporal progress structure in offline logs and co-designing cost form with plan-time deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/TD-JEPA.

How JEPA Avoids Noisy Features: The Implicit Bias of Deep Linear Self Distillation Networks

Two competing paradigms exist for self-supervised learning of data representations. Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) is a class of architectures in which semantically similar inputs are encoded into representations that are predictive of each other. A recent successful approach that falls under the JEPA framework is self-distillation, where an online encoder is trained to predict the output of the target encoder, sometimes using a lightweight predictor network. This is contrasted with the Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) paradigm, where an encoder and decoder are trained to reconstruct missing parts of the input in the data space rather, than its latent representation. A common motivation for using the JEPA approach over MAE is that the JEPA objective prioritizes abstract features over fine-grained pixel information (which can be unpredictable and uninformative). In this work, we seek to understand the mechanism behind this empirical observation by analyzing the training dynamics of deep linear models. We uncover a surprising mechanism: in a simplified linear setting where both approaches learn similar representations, JEPAs are biased to learn high-influence features, i.e., features characterized by having high regression coefficients. Our results point to a distinct implicit bias of predicting in latent space that may shed light on its success in practice.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Medical Ultrasound

Ultrasound (US) imaging poses unique challenges for representation learning due to its inherently noisy acquisition process. The low signal-to-noise ratio and stochastic speckle patterns hinder standard self-supervised learning methods relying on a pixel-level reconstruction objective. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) address this drawback by predicting masked latent representations rather than raw pixels. However, standard approaches depend on hyperparameter-brittle and computationally expensive online teachers updated via exponential moving average. We propose US-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that adopts the Static-teacher Asymmetric Latent Training (SALT) objective. By using a frozen, domain-specific teacher to provide stable latent targets, US-JEPA decouples student-teacher optimization and pushes the student to expand upon the semantic priors of the teacher. In addition, we provide the first rigorous comparison of all publicly available state-of-the-art ultrasound foundation models on UltraBench, a public dataset benchmark spanning multiple organs and pathological conditions. Under linear probing for diverse classification tasks, US-JEPA achieves performance competitive with or superior to domain-specific and universal vision foundation model baselines. Our results demonstrate that masked latent prediction provides a stable and efficient path toward robust ultrasound representations.

  • 6 authors
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Feb 22

DLLM-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have reshaped self-supervised representation learning in vision. The recent LLM-JEPA ported JEPA to autoregressive language models but inherited two steep costs from the causal-attention substrate: it demands explicit multi-view data (e.g., text-code pairs), and it requires two gradient-carrying forward passes per step. We introduce DLLM-JEPA, which pairs JEPA with masked-diffusion language models to eliminate both costs at once. The bidirectional attention of diffusion models yields two semantically distinct views of the same input via different masking rates -- no explicit pairs needed -- and supports a single gradient-carrying forward pass, cutting training FLOPs by 33% relative to LLM-JEPA. DLLM-JEPA improves over diffusion-only fine-tuning in every (task, architecture) combination we evaluate: up to +18.7 pp on LLaDA-8B GSM8K and +11.4 pp on Dream-7B GSM8K, with consistent positive gains on Spider, NL-RX-SYNTH, and Django. Beyond accuracy, DLLM-JEPA exhibits a dual-win property: on LLaDA-8B with the Wide-t configuration, it simultaneously raises GSM8K accuracy (67.1 vs. 65.2, +1.8 pp), drives held-out Wikitext loss below the pre-trained base, and preserves MMLU accuracy at base level across three fine-tuning seeds -- whereas an L2-to-base parameter anchor matches baseline accuracy with no task gain. Layer-wise probing reveals the mechanism: a geometric-functional drift dissociation in which the fine-tuned backbone moves further from the pre-trained weights than the baseline yet forgets less on held-out Wikitext, with the amplification concentrated in middle transformer layers. The pattern appears on Dream-7B as well, indicating the phenomenon is not specific to a single backbone.

  • 1 authors
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May 23

WA-JEPA: Rethinking the Video JEPA Paradigm for World-Action Modeling in Autonomous Driving

Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) learns powerful spatiotemporal representations from video through self-supervised latent feature prediction. However, V-JEPA is built around random-mask completion and deterministic regression, making it fundamentally ill-suited for autonomous driving planning that demands future-directed prediction tightly coupled with action. To address this, we rethink the V-JEPA paradigm and present WA-JEPA, a V-JEPA-native world-action model designed for autonomous driving planning. Instead of random spatiotemporal masking, WA-JEPA employs hybrid future-masked pre-training, where the model infers future latents from observed context. Departing from deterministic regression, we recast future prediction as conditional flow matching over latent futures, which substantially improves the model's ability to generate plausible future latents for downstream planning. Finally, a joint future-action predictor is proposed to denoise future scene tokens and ego trajectories together in a unified spatiotemporal latent space, allowing action supervision to directly shape planning-relevant world representations. Pre-trained on nuPlan videos and fine-tuned on NAVSIM, WA-JEPA reaches 91.7 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v2, surpassing the strongest end-to-end and world-action baselines by 1.6 and 1.3 EPDMS, and, without HUGSIM-specific fine-tuning, attains the best HD-Score of 0.4462 on the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark under the same evaluation protocol. These results validate V-JEPA-native world-action modeling as a powerful and scalable paradigm for autonomous driving planning. Code is available at https://github.com/AFARI-Research/WA-JEPA.

  • 14 authors
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Aug 21

V-JEPA Policy: Building Effective World-Action Models on Predictive Visual Latents

World-action models (WAMs) couple future visual-state prediction with action generation. By adapting video generators or image-editing models pretrained at scale, a prominent line of recent WAMs inherits both predictive knowledge and the models in which it was learned. We ask whether a predictive visual latent space induced by large-scale predictive pretraining can instead provide a sufficient foundation for effective WAM learning without inheriting a complete pretrained visual generative model. To answer this question, we introduce V-JEPA Policy, a simple framework that builds a WAM on the latent space of a frozen V-JEPA 2.1 encoder. An instruction-conditioned future-latent predictor and a flow-matching action expert are jointly learned from scratch in a single downstream stage, with the predictor's future-informed context key--value states conditioning action generation. With 0.9B total parameters, of which 0.6B are trainable, V-JEPA Policy achieves competitive performance with representative WAM and vision-language-action baselines across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboCasa-GR1. Comparing visual foundations under the same downstream framework and training budget identifies V-JEPA latents as more effective than the discriminative, reconstructive, and video-understanding-oriented alternatives, particularly under distribution shifts. Beyond task-specific learning, pretraining the predictor on DROID video--instruction pairs without action labels and adapting it into a WAM yields substantial gains in downstream control and out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these findings establish predictive visual latents as a foundation for effective WAM learning from task-specific demonstrations and for transferring future-modeling knowledge acquired from broader in-the-wild videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/breez3young/VJEPA-Policy.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 28

CardioState-JEPA: Delay-Aware Cross-Modal Learning of a Shared Cardiac Representation

Electrocardiography (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG), and phonocardiography (PCG) provide complementary views of the same cardiac cycle, yet existing cardiac foundation models are trained for a single sensing modality, leaving the shared physiology across sensors unexploited. We introduce CardioState-JEPA, a cardiac foundation model to learn a single shared representation jointly across ECG, PPG, and PCG, built on a physiology-aware joint-embedding predictive architecture. The model maps heterogeneous waveforms into a common token space, processes them with a single shared Transformer encoder, and learns by predicting masked latent cardiac states, placing the pretraining target on shared physiology rather than sensor-specific waveform appearance. To handle the temporal offsets between electrical, mechanical, and hemodynamic events, cross-modal prediction uses a learned delay aligner that matches signals at the corresponding cardiac time. Because synchronized multi-sensor recordings are scarce, CardioState-JEPA first learns within-modality structure from abundant unimodal data and then uses paired data to align modalities in latent cardiac time. Evaluated as a frozen encoder across 25 downstream tasks spanning ECG, PPG, and PCG, our encoder improves average PPG classification by 8.2 AUROC points, PCG murmur detection by 18.8 AUROC points, and ECG classification by 15.5 AUROC points over the best self-supervised signal baseline and matches or exceeds cardiac models trained with privileged clinical text or supervised labels on several ECG benchmarks. These results establish that heterogeneous cardiac signals can mutually supervise a single foundation model of cardiac physiology.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 12 2

Schema-Adaptive Action-Conditioned JEPA for Cross-Machine CNC Transfer under Partial Sensor Overlap

Cross-machine deployment of industrial world models requires transfer across changes in dynamics, sensing interfaces, sampling regimes, and control units. We study a schema-adaptive action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (SAAC-JEPA) for CNC dynamics, where the source machine has 17 canonical sensor channels and the target shares only 10. Evaluation uses group-disjoint source splits, source-only normalization, held-out self-supervised validation, unit audits, and a sealed target test after model locking. Across five seeds, JEPA pretraining gives no clean-source forecasting gain: scratch and pretrained-body models obtain \(RMSE=0.811\pm0.022\) and \(0.813\pm0.022\). A source-only search over 20 candidates selects a schema-consistent action-conditioned JEPA after seven-seed stability checks. On the confirmatory target pass, the locked model reaches zero-shot \(RMSE=0.546\), \(R^2=0.012\), and \(NLL=0.52\), outperforming persistence but not RevIN-equipped PatchTST and iTransformer baselines (\(0.503\) and \(0.498\)). A pre-declared paired ablation shows that RevIN in the same architecture improves RMSE to \(0.495\pm0.004\) over three seeds, but degrades target calibration (\(NLL=20.6\)) on stationary context windows. A pre-lock adaptation sweep further reduces RMSE to \(0.520\) with limited target support. These results show that source-domain forecasting accuracy alone is insufficient to assess industrial predictive representations, and that cross-machine adaptation under partial sensor overlap is a distinct evaluation axis.

Frozen in a Frame: The Velocity Blind Spot in JEPA World Models

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) for world modeling train an encoder so a predictor maps a current embedding and action to the next frame's embedding, always from a single rendered frame. This has a structural blind spot: a renderer without motion blur draws a scene from configuration alone, so a single-frame embedding carries no velocity information, for any encoder, including the official released LeWM weights. We confirm this on official checkpoints across four real benchmarks (PushT, Reacher, Cube, TwoRoom): every linear velocity probe sits at or below chance while position probes reach R^2 about 0.95. We introduce RateIdent, a three-stage diagnostic protocol, and TI-JEPA, a lightweight fix splitting the latent into a pose code and an explicit finite-difference motion code, predicted jointly. Across three physically grounded environments, TI-JEPA gives a significant, seed-robust gain on a stop-at-goal planning task over a matched-memory baseline, e.g. 55% lower final distance on Pendulum (p=3.2x10^-10) and 64% on CartPole (p=5.1x10^-15). We reproduce this at official ViT-Tiny plus AdaLN-transformer scale, then push the same recipe onto real dm_control Reacher photographs trained from scratch, where TI-JEPA's branch separation exceeds the memory-having baseline's by roughly 38x, the paper's largest margin. Against a same-footprint recurrent RSSM-style predictor, TI-JEPA matches or beats its rollout accuracy on two of three environments, stays separately probeable for pose and motion, and wins outright on the most coupled one. A checkable formal argument and six evaluated environments show single-frame targets are the wrong object to predict when velocity matters, and a small, interpretable structural change fixes it with no privileged supervision. Code, checkpoints, and the project page are linked below the title.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 2

Domain-Informed Multi-View Self-Distillation for Astronomical Light-Curve Representation Learning with JEPA

Light curves describe temporal variations in the brightness of celestial objects. Learning robust representations of light curves is essential for large-scale automatic discovery in the dynamic universe, but existing time-series foundation models often struggle with the uneven sampling, complex noise, and wide range of physical timescales that characterize astronomical observations. We propose a domain-informed representation learning framework for irregular astronomical time series with Joint-Embedding predictive architecture (JEPA), combining semantics-preserving views, uncertainty-aware tokenization, and multi-view self-distillation. The encoders are trained with multi-view self-distillation using LeJEPA regularization on the LEAVES dataset and evaluated on the StarEmbed classification benchmark. On StarEmbed, our model outperforms hand-crafted features on 15 of 16 classification metrics. In few-shot linear probing, it achieves macro-F1 scores of 42.56 pm 7.21 with one sample per class and 63.58 pm 1.20 with 100 samples per class, consistently improving over hand-crafted features. Beyond variable-star classification, the learned representation supports similarity search, parameter estimation, and photometric zero-point drift detection. We further evaluate cross-domain adaptation on 12 heterogeneous irregular time-series datasets from PYRREGULAR, where the adapted variant matches or exceeds previous state-of-the-art performance on 5 datasets, compared with at most 3 wins by any single prior baseline. These results demonstrate that domain-informed multi-view self-distillation is an effective strategy for learning representations of irregular time series, while also highlighting that successful time-series representation learning requires domain-specific inductive biases rather than a universally optimal architecture.

  • 1 authors
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Jun 25

Leveraging Generic Foundation Models for Multimodal Surgical Data Analysis

We investigate how both the adaptation of a generic foundation model via transfer learning and the integration of complementary modalities from the operating room (OR) can support surgical data science. To this end, we use V-JEPA as the single-modality foundation of a multimodal model for minimally invasive surgery support. We analyze how the model's downstream performance can benefit (a) from finetuning on unlabeled surgical video data and (b) from providing additional time-resolved data streams from the OR in a multimodal setup. In an in-house dataset of liver surgery videos, we analyze the tasks of predicting hospital length of stay and postoperative complications. In videos of the public HeiCo dataset, we analyze the task of surgical phase recognition. As a baseline, we apply pretrained V-JEPA to all tasks. We then finetune it on unlabeled, held-out videos to investigate its change in performance after domain adaptation. Following the idea of modular decision support networks, we integrate additional data streams from the OR by training a separate encoder to form a shared representation space with V-JEPA's embeddings. Our experiments show that finetuning on domain-specific data increases model performance. On the in-house data, integrating additional time-resolved data likewise benefits the model. On the HeiCo data, accuracy of the pretrained video-only, single-modality baseline setup is on par with the top-performing submissions of the EndoVis2017 challenge, while finetuning on domain-specific data increases accuracy further. Our results thus demonstrate how surgical data science can leverage public, generic foundation models. Likewise, they indicate the potential of domain adaptation and of integrating suitable complementary data streams from the OR. To support further research, we release our code and model weights at https://github.com/DigitalSurgeryLab-Basel/ML-CDS-2025.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 8, 2025

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

  • 12 authors
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Jun 12

RESETTLE: Robotic Recovery through Disagreement-Triggered Retrieval and Efficient Corrective Control

Reliable robotic manipulation requires timely intervention to correct emerging deviations and restore progress after execution errors. However, recovery methods based on repeated vision-language reasoning or iterative online optimization can incur substantial latency, delaying intervention. To address these challenges, we introduce RESETTLE(Robotic rEcovery through diSagrEement-Triggered reTrievaL and Efficient Corrective Control), a model-agnostic framework that provides computationally efficient recovery at the action-execution interface of frozen robot policies. RESETTLE triggers recovery when two action proposals independently sampled under identical conditioning persistently disagree. It retrieves a same-task demonstration reference using an adapted V-JEPA encoder and combines a state-servo prior with a guarded visual residual to execute one corrective action without online trajectory optimization or additional vision-language reasoning, then returns control to the base policy. Across six base policies in simulation, RESETTLE achieves up to 8.70%, 6.28%, and 6.83% absolute success-rate gains on LIBERO-Plus, Meta-World, and RoboCasa Tabletop, respectively, with further improvements on four real-world tasks using two policies. In QwenPI-based comparisons, its monitoring-and-recovery computation latency is 74.04%--93.57% lower than VoLoAgent's monitoring-and-planning latency for grasp and place tool calls. It also raises Harness VLA's LIBERO-Pro Swap success from 42% to 50%, demonstrating compatibility with high-level agentic planning. Code available at: https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/RESETTLE

  • 9 authors
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Oct 7

LeVJEPA: Efficient & Scalable Video Pretraining without the Heuristics

Video carries the temporal structure of the physical world, yet learning representations from it has remained computationally expensive: prevailing self-supervised methods either prevent representation collapse through architectural asymmetries, coupling an exponential-moving-average target encoder, a stop-gradient, and a capacity-limited predictor, or circumvent it by reconstructing masked content in pixel space. We introduce LeVJEPA, the first video encoder trained under LeJEPA's collapse-free objective, which dispenses with both. A single encoder is trained with an invariance loss over global and local views of a clip, regularized by SIGReg, which excludes collapse with a provable guarantee. The architecture reduces to an encoder and a projector, and the objective to a single hyperparameter. This formulation admits two properties. First, the cost of pretraining is governed by the number of tokens the encoder observes; uniform random token dropping renders this number small while simultaneously improving downstream accuracy. At matched epochs on identical data, LeVJEPA matches or surpasses V-JEPA 2 across ViT-S/B/L at 5.6 to 20.8x less pretraining compute, and at matched total FLOPs it exceeds the strongest video baseline by 7.6 points on ImageNet-1K while remaining competitive on motion-centric benchmarks. Second, since no asymmetry between branches is required, the encoder can be trained with block-causal attention at no measurable accuracy cost: temporal ordering becomes a property of the encoder itself. Against a compute-matched DINOv2 trained on frames of the same videos, LeVJEPA approaches the image-pretrained encoder on appearance-centric evaluation while nearly doubling its motion-centric accuracy. These results indicate that, once its computational overhead is removed, video becomes a viable and in several respects preferable substrate for general-purpose visual pretraining.

  • 7 authors
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Aug 26

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

  • 11 authors
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Jun 11

Tracking Is Not Permanence: What Video World Models Keep of a Hidden Object

Video world models track objects they can see; we ask what they keep of objects they cannot. We hide an object from a frozen V-JEPA 2 predictor and compare its prediction for the hidden region with the encoder's representation of two worlds that differ only inside that region. The predictor's decision keeps a stationary object in part and one carried inside a container not at all, and loses a moving one within 0.3 s (0.5 s under V-JEPA's own tube mask; ViT-H keeps it to 1.1 s at pretraining's 90% masking ratio); in projection a trace remains, below the midpoint, at 14-60% of what a baseline copying the last view retains. The information is there: the encoder reads the object's presence at 1.00 and keeps a closed container's contents decodable for 3.5 s, while the predictor's output, read with the encoder's own probe, contains the ball in 2% of scenes once the box has been closed for half a second. On rendered scenes, permanence is missing on the predictor's side, and training installs it cheaply as a prior: three thousand predictor-only steps on synthetic containers take this belief from 0.05 to 1.00 against two matched controls. They also raise IntPhys-2019 from 84.2% to 93.3%, but so does a curriculum without containers, and which training habit the benchmark credits changes with its scoring rule. Continued training with tube masks produces 1.1-1.6 s of moving-object carry-over on manipulation and internet-style video, so the deficit is not intrinsic to latent prediction. VideoMAE keeps almost nothing, and Cosmos's next-token prediction keeps a stationary hidden object but not one carried inside a moving container.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 4