Is the reconstruction loss culprit? An attempt to outperform JEPA

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Potapov, Alexey, Shcherbakov, Oleg, Kravchenko, Ivan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Potapov, Alexey
Shcherbakov, Oleg
Kravchenko, Ivan
author_facet Potapov, Alexey
Shcherbakov, Oleg
Kravchenko, Ivan
contents We evaluate JEPA-style predictive representation learning versus reconstruction-based autoencoders on a controlled "TV-series" linear dynamical system with known latent state and a single noise parameter. While an initial comparison suggests JEPA is markedly more robust to noise, further diagnostics show that autoencoder failures are strongly influenced by asymmetries in objectives and by bottleneck/component-selection effects (confirmed by PCA baselines). Motivated by these findings, we introduce gated predictive autoencoders that learn to select predictable components, mimicking the beneficial feature-selection behavior observed in over-parameterized PCA. On this toy testbed, the proposed gated model is stable across noise levels and matches or outperforms JEPA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is the reconstruction loss culprit? An attempt to outperform JEPA
Potapov, Alexey
Shcherbakov, Oleg
Kravchenko, Ivan
Machine Learning
We evaluate JEPA-style predictive representation learning versus reconstruction-based autoencoders on a controlled "TV-series" linear dynamical system with known latent state and a single noise parameter. While an initial comparison suggests JEPA is markedly more robust to noise, further diagnostics show that autoencoder failures are strongly influenced by asymmetries in objectives and by bottleneck/component-selection effects (confirmed by PCA baselines). Motivated by these findings, we introduce gated predictive autoencoders that learn to select predictable components, mimicking the beneficial feature-selection behavior observed in over-parameterized PCA. On this toy testbed, the proposed gated model is stable across noise levels and matches or outperforms JEPA.
title Is the reconstruction loss culprit? An attempt to outperform JEPA
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14131