US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Medical Ultrasound

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Radhachandran, Ashwath, Ivezić, Vedrana, Athreya, Shreeram, Anilkumar, Ronit, Arnold, Corey W., Speier, William
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Radhachandran, Ashwath
Ivezić, Vedrana
Athreya, Shreeram
Anilkumar, Ronit
Arnold, Corey W.
Speier, William
author_facet Radhachandran, Ashwath
Ivezić, Vedrana
Athreya, Shreeram
Anilkumar, Ronit
Arnold, Corey W.
Speier, William
contents Ultrasound (US) imaging poses unique challenges for representation learning due to its inherently noisy acquisition process. The low signal-to-noise ratio and stochastic speckle patterns hinder standard self-supervised learning methods relying on a pixel-level reconstruction objective. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) address this drawback by predicting masked latent representations rather than raw pixels. However, standard approaches depend on hyperparameter-brittle and computationally expensive online teachers updated via exponential moving average. We propose US-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that adopts the Static-teacher Asymmetric Latent Training (SALT) objective. By using a frozen, domain-specific teacher to provide stable latent targets, US-JEPA decouples student-teacher optimization and pushes the student to expand upon the semantic priors of the teacher. In addition, we provide the first rigorous comparison of all publicly available state-of-the-art ultrasound foundation models on UltraBench, a public dataset benchmark spanning multiple organs and pathological conditions. Under linear probing for diverse classification tasks, US-JEPA achieves performance competitive with or superior to domain-specific and universal vision foundation model baselines. Our results demonstrate that masked latent prediction provides a stable and efficient path toward robust ultrasound representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Medical Ultrasound
Radhachandran, Ashwath
Ivezić, Vedrana
Athreya, Shreeram
Anilkumar, Ronit
Arnold, Corey W.
Speier, William
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Ultrasound (US) imaging poses unique challenges for representation learning due to its inherently noisy acquisition process. The low signal-to-noise ratio and stochastic speckle patterns hinder standard self-supervised learning methods relying on a pixel-level reconstruction objective. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) address this drawback by predicting masked latent representations rather than raw pixels. However, standard approaches depend on hyperparameter-brittle and computationally expensive online teachers updated via exponential moving average. We propose US-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that adopts the Static-teacher Asymmetric Latent Training (SALT) objective. By using a frozen, domain-specific teacher to provide stable latent targets, US-JEPA decouples student-teacher optimization and pushes the student to expand upon the semantic priors of the teacher. In addition, we provide the first rigorous comparison of all publicly available state-of-the-art ultrasound foundation models on UltraBench, a public dataset benchmark spanning multiple organs and pathological conditions. Under linear probing for diverse classification tasks, US-JEPA achieves performance competitive with or superior to domain-specific and universal vision foundation model baselines. Our results demonstrate that masked latent prediction provides a stable and efficient path toward robust ultrasound representations.
title US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Medical Ultrasound
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19322