The paper introduces Action-Contrastive Masked Transition Modeling (AC‑MTM), a method that stabilizes Joint‑Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) without relying on Gaussian regularization. AC‑MTM adds a training‑only inverse‑dynamics head that uses Action‑NCE to force each latent transition to identify its generating action, thereby preventing encoder collapse. Experiments on pixel‑control and multi‑object visual tasks show that AC‑MTM trains stably from scratch and matches or surpasses the performance of SIGReg, achieving up to a 24‑point improvement on the OGBench Visual Scene benchmark.
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) underpin a growing family of latent world models for control from raw pixels, but every existing JEPA world model commits at training time to a single inference paradigm: either trajectory optimisation in a learned dynamics model, or direct behaviour cloning. A single checkpoint that serves both would defer this choice to inference, when deployment constraints (rollout cost, observation accessibility) determine which path wins.
arXiv:2607. 04978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) underpin a growing family of latent world models for control from raw pixels, but every existing JEPA world model commits at training time to a single inference paradigm: either trajectory optimisation in a learned dynamics model, or direct behaviour cloning.
By Ruslan Rakhimov, George Bredis, Yuriy Maksyuta, Daniil Gavrilov
arXiv:2609.37250v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) couple future visual-state prediction with action generation. By adapting video generators or image-editing models pretrai...
By Yang Zhang, Jiangyuan Zhao, Chenyou Fan, Jiayu Hu, Xiu Yuan, Chenjia Bai, Xiu Li
arXiv:2608. 11605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) couple future visual prediction with robot action generation, enabling policies to model how the physical world evolves during interaction.
By Jiakai Huang, Zhongbo Wu, Zheng Zhang, Zihan Wang, Shan You, Tao Huang
JEPA-x is a cross‑predictive physics grounding method that aligns visual latent dynamics with privileged physical trajectories. By treating visual observations and physical states as two views of the same action‑conditioned trajectory and sharing a predictor, it forces the model to learn a common transition rule for both modalities. The physical branch is only used during training, so deployment incurs no extra cost, and the approach significantly reduces rollout drift and boosts control success across a multi‑task suite.
By Kehan Wen, Ziming Li, Siyuan Luo, Fan Shi
arXiv:2606. 20104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions.
By Petr Ivashkov, Randall Balestriero, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
Subspace-Decomposed JEPAs (SD-JEPA) split the latent space of Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures into two orthogonal subspaces: a low-dimensional progression subspace trained with a cosine-margin triplet loss and a high-dimensional content subspace regularised by SIGReg. The authors prove that the anti-collapse forces act on disjoint coordinates, allowing additive composition rather than competition. SD-JEPA outperforms the LeWM baseline on most control benchmarks and the strongest non-LeWM JEPA baseline on Push‑T, with a subspace-ablation confirming the split as essential. The 1‑D angular progression coordinate serves as a scene-aware compass, advancing with task progress, regressing on backtracking, and relocalising under perturbations to separate surprise from meaning.
By Lucas Thil, Jesse Read, Rim Kaddah, Guillaume Doquet
AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.
By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
arXiv:2609.10464v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models learn a compact latent representation of the world that supports prediction and planning,...
By Andy Zeyi Liu, Haoran Sun, Lucas Baker, Randall Balestriero, John Sous
The paper presents an end‑to‑end JEPA world model that enhances latent prediction with inverse dynamics and state alignment to improve goal‑conditioned robotic planning. By preventing latent collapse and grounding representations in physical configuration, the model achieves top success rates on tasks such as TwoRoom, PushT, and OGBench‑Cube, outperforming the baseline LeWorldModel. Ablation studies confirm that state alignment consistently boosts planning success over inverse dynamics alone across all four benchmark tasks.
By Muyuan Liu (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Yue Huang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Zheng Liang (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China), Xiang Gao (GENISOM AI, Beijing, China)
The paper argues that diffusion-based action policies can use a frozen, observation‑free backbone as a reusable trajectory prior, with task adaptation handled entirely by the conditioning pathway. By pretraining a general action head on forward‑kinematics data and then freezing it, the authors show that a single backbone can match or outperform normally trained models on MimicGen and LIBERO. Their experiments reveal that a small 5 M‑parameter MLP backbone can rival large U‑Net and transformer backbones, indicating that action backbones are often over‑parameterized and that image‑style architectures may not be the best fit for low‑dimensional action generation.
By Jian Zhou, Sihao Lin, Shuai Fu, Zerui Li, Gengze Zhou, Qi WU