arXiv Machine Learning

I Act Therefore I Am: When Is JEPA's Action-Conditioning Enough to Learn Causal Mechanisms?

The paper studies when joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) can recover underlying causal states from high‑dimensional observations. It introduces a latent variable model where observations arise from causal states with action‑conditioned dynamics, and proposes an information‑theoretic objective that maximizes conditional likelihood while preserving state entropy. The authors prove identifiability conditions—particularly sufficient action‑induced variation—and instantiate the objective as an action‑modulated Gaussian additive‑noise model (A‑JEPA), demonstrating theoretical and empirical success in synthetic and visual benchmarks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

On the Identifiability of Controlled World Models

arXiv:2607. 22430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning world models that infer environment dynamics from high-dimensional observations and predict outcomes under candidate actions is central to planning and control.

By Xiangteng Zhang, Yang Guan, Bo Zhang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Shengbo Eben Li
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Flow-JEPA: Flow Matching for Robust Latent Dynamics in JEPA World Models

Flow-JEPA introduces a conditional flow matching dynamics model that generates a sequence of future latent states conditioned on current observations and actions, replacing deterministic autoregressive prediction with stochastic trajectory-level prediction. By using a Gaussian flow source, the model learns to transport perturbed latent trajectories toward clean future representations while remaining within the reconstruction‑free JEPA framework. The approach improves mean success rates from 86% to 92% under clean observations and from 67% to 86% under noisy conditions.

By Yanchen Huo, Ziying Song, Yadan Luo
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

JEPA-x: Cross-Predictive Physics Grounding for Forecastable Latent Dynamics

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 Machine Learning
Jun 18

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606. 18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes.

By Soheun Yi, Yizhou Lu, Chandler Squires, Pradeep Ravikumar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 29

Textual Belief States for World Models: Identifiable Representation Learning Under Strict Mediation

arXiv:2606. 27681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models in partially observed environments rely on latent representations that summarize interaction history, but in many modern LLM-based architectures predictive performance fails to reflect representation quality due to history bypass, rendering the latent state unidentifiable.

By Xiang Gao, Kaiwen Dong, Yuguang Yao, Padmaja Jonnalagedda, Kamalika Das