arXiv:2607. 16204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent growth in reinforcement learning (RL) has surfaced a need for diverse, specialized training environments.
By Darshan Deshpande
arXiv:2607. 18715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models underpin much of modern model-based control, yet current action-conditioned formulations supervise the next-latent transition with a single, undifferentiated target, forcing a monolithic learning signal to absorb every source of state change.
By Yi-Ge Zhang, Tianqi Du, Qi Zhang, Yisen Wang
arXiv:2608. 01049v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models have attracted significant attention for their ability to capture and predict the structure and dynamics of the physical world.
By Kapil Wanaskar, Gaytri Jena, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Vasu Sharma, Amitava Das
arXiv:2608. 10016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Heterogeneous federated systems require agents to learn and exchange informative representations despite differences in data distributions, sensing modalities, model architectures, latent dimensionalities, and local learning objectives.
By Gabriele D'Acunto, Enrico Grimaldi, Valeria Avino, Mario Edoardo Pandolfo, Leonardo Di Nino, Sergio Barbarossa, Paolo Di Lorenzo
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
The paper introduces DSReg, a method that provably recovers individual world latent variables without relying on reconstruction, decoders, or labels. It leverages a Structural Diversity condition—distinct dependency footprints of different latents—to achieve full identifiability up to signed permutation. DSReg can be applied post hoc to any linearly identified representation, preserving dense prediction while improving latent recovery across synthetic and real-world experiments.
By Yujia Zheng, David Klindt, Randall Balestriero, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn latent dynamics for planning and avoid representation collapse by matching features to maximum-entropy distributions such as isotropic Gaussians,...
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.
The paper introduces a lightweight Fourier auxiliary head to enforce physically-informed structuring of latent states in JEPA-style world models, addressing a newly identified failure mode called physical representation laziness that hampers planning in dynamic environments. Experiments show that this auxiliary supervision improves planning success rates, enhances latent space correlations with key physical properties, and boosts data efficiency, even when the baseline model does not exhibit laziness.
By Penghao Zhu, Salvatore Penachio, Kaustav Mukherjee, Aneesh Jonelagadda
The paper introduces Action-Contrastive Masked Transition Modeling (AC‑MTM), a method that replaces the Gaussian regularizer used in Joint‑Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) with a contrastive inverse‑dynamics head. AC‑MTM trains a forward latent‑prediction model while an auxiliary inverse‑dynamics task forces the encoder to distinguish actions from latent transitions, preventing collapse without requiring a target network or reconstruction loss. Experiments on pixel‑control and multi‑object visual tasks show that AC‑MTM matches or surpasses the performance of the Gaussian‑based SIGReg regularizer, achieving up to 20–24 point improvements on the OGBench Visual Scene benchmark.
By Jack Boylan, Chris Hokamp
arXiv:2606. 16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models.
By Shaowei Zhang, Jiahan Cao, Xunlan Zhou, Shenghua Wan, De-Chuan Zhan
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