The JEPA Paradox in Language: The Geometry of Linguistic Alternatives

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.23531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are effective for images, video, and audio, yet deterministic JEPA-style latent prediction has not become a standard objective for text encoders. We argue that this gap reflects a mismatch between squared-error latent prediction and the conditional structure of language. The key requirement is conditional concentration: given a context and target location, the target representation should lie near a single meaningful point. Local image prediction often satisfies this through spatial continuity, whereas masked text can admit multiple valid token or span completions whose representations need not share a coherent center. We formalize this mismatch through three conditions---predictability, non-co