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
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.
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
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.
ARC‑Bench is a new benchmark that tests whether frozen JEPA‑style latent world models can correctly rank candidate actions by latent distance. The study finds that the assumption of latent rankability fails dramatically in both navigation and manipulation tasks, with the top‑scored actions often being suboptimal. Closed‑loop replanning masks this defect, but reducing replanning frequency reveals the underlying ranking failures.
By Zhengshu Zhang, Zhiyuan Li
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