Gaussian Embeddings: How JEPAs Secretly Learn Your Data Density

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Balestriero, Randall, Ballas, Nicolas, Rabbat, Mike, LeCun, Yann
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Balestriero, Randall
Ballas, Nicolas
Rabbat, Mike
LeCun, Yann
author_facet Balestriero, Randall
Ballas, Nicolas
Rabbat, Mike
LeCun, Yann
contents Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn representations able to solve numerous downstream tasks out-of-the-box. JEPAs combine two objectives: (i) a latent-space prediction term, i.e., the representation of a slightly perturbed sample must be predictable from the original sample's representation, and (ii) an anti-collapse term, i.e., not all samples should have the same representation. While (ii) is often considered as an obvious remedy to representation collapse, we uncover that JEPAs' anti-collapse term does much more--it provably estimates the data density. In short, any successfully trained JEPA can be used to get sample probabilities, e.g., for data curation, outlier detection, or simply for density estimation. Our theoretical finding is agnostic of the dataset and architecture used--in any case one can compute the learned probabilities of sample $x$ efficiently and in closed-form using the model's Jacobian matrix at $x$. Our findings are empirically validated across datasets (synthetic, controlled, and Imagenet) and across different Self Supervised Learning methods falling under the JEPA family (I-JEPA and DINOv2) and on multimodal models, such as MetaCLIP. We denote the method extracting the JEPA learned density as {\bf JEPA-SCORE}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gaussian Embeddings: How JEPAs Secretly Learn Your Data Density
Balestriero, Randall
Ballas, Nicolas
Rabbat, Mike
LeCun, Yann
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) learn representations able to solve numerous downstream tasks out-of-the-box. JEPAs combine two objectives: (i) a latent-space prediction term, i.e., the representation of a slightly perturbed sample must be predictable from the original sample's representation, and (ii) an anti-collapse term, i.e., not all samples should have the same representation. While (ii) is often considered as an obvious remedy to representation collapse, we uncover that JEPAs' anti-collapse term does much more--it provably estimates the data density. In short, any successfully trained JEPA can be used to get sample probabilities, e.g., for data curation, outlier detection, or simply for density estimation. Our theoretical finding is agnostic of the dataset and architecture used--in any case one can compute the learned probabilities of sample $x$ efficiently and in closed-form using the model's Jacobian matrix at $x$. Our findings are empirically validated across datasets (synthetic, controlled, and Imagenet) and across different Self Supervised Learning methods falling under the JEPA family (I-JEPA and DINOv2) and on multimodal models, such as MetaCLIP. We denote the method extracting the JEPA learned density as {\bf JEPA-SCORE}.
title Gaussian Embeddings: How JEPAs Secretly Learn Your Data Density
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05949