PEIRA: Learning Predictive Encoders through Inter-View Regressor Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Arbel, Michael, Terver, Basile, Ponce, Jean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Arbel, Michael
Terver, Basile
Ponce, Jean
author_facet Arbel, Michael
Terver, Basile
Ponce, Jean
contents Non-contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) is an effective framework for predictive representation learning, but popular (and in practice effective) methods such as SimSiam, BYOL, I-JEPA or DINO, which rely on a form of self-distillation to train a teacher-student network, remain poorly understood as they typically do not minimize a well-defined objective. We analyze the dynamics of a variant of the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) using a regularized linear regressor to predict the learned representations of two views of the data from one another, and fully characterize its stability: non-collapsed stable equilibria align with leading nonlinear canonical correlation subspaces, while collapsed equilibria may also be stable attractors. Motivated by this result, we introduce PEIRA, a non-contrastive SSL method with an explicit objective defined through the trace of the optimal linear regressor. We show that its only stable equilibria are nontrivial global minimizers and recover the same canonical correlation subspaces, with regularization selecting the effective dimension. Experiments on ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-10 show PEIRA is competitive with VICReg and LeJEPA baselines, and qualitative empirical results support the theory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17671
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PEIRA: Learning Predictive Encoders through Inter-View Regressor Alignment
Arbel, Michael
Terver, Basile
Ponce, Jean
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Non-contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) is an effective framework for predictive representation learning, but popular (and in practice effective) methods such as SimSiam, BYOL, I-JEPA or DINO, which rely on a form of self-distillation to train a teacher-student network, remain poorly understood as they typically do not minimize a well-defined objective. We analyze the dynamics of a variant of the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) using a regularized linear regressor to predict the learned representations of two views of the data from one another, and fully characterize its stability: non-collapsed stable equilibria align with leading nonlinear canonical correlation subspaces, while collapsed equilibria may also be stable attractors. Motivated by this result, we introduce PEIRA, a non-contrastive SSL method with an explicit objective defined through the trace of the optimal linear regressor. We show that its only stable equilibria are nontrivial global minimizers and recover the same canonical correlation subspaces, with regularization selecting the effective dimension. Experiments on ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-10 show PEIRA is competitive with VICReg and LeJEPA baselines, and qualitative empirical results support the theory.
title PEIRA: Learning Predictive Encoders through Inter-View Regressor Alignment
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17671