Inside-JEPA: From Prediction to Relational Grounding in Latent World Models

Overview & Synopsis

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models in latent space, enabling efficient planning but leaving their states opaque. We introduce Inside-JEPA, which places relational channels for ordered entity pairs inside the JEPA latent state and shows that an inverse-dynamics loss can ground these channels without relation labels when its head reads them, either alone or as part of the full state. On Something-Something V2, latent prediction alone performs no better than a random relation head, while inverse-dynamics supervision that recovers actions from channel changes improves relational AUROC by .065-.103 across ten settings with annotated boxes, by .081 on RH20T robot episodes with held-out tasks, and by .050-.061 across five relations using off-the-shelf detection and tracking. An inverse head on entity latents decodes actions more accurately but barely improves relational grounding; shuffled labels, two label-free objectives, and action labels on only 5% of the pairs also fail to ground the channels. Given an action, predicted relational changes approach the quality of observed future relations (AUROC .599 vs .621). For one-step relational goals, a supervised readout of the 16 channels ranks the correct action among the top five of 65 in 43% of cases, compared with 24% for prediction-only latents and 17% for a frequency prior.