LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics
This work addresses the problem of making self-supervised learning more principled and scalable for AI researchers, offering a method that is stable across domains and architectures without relying on heuristics.
The paper tackled the lack of theory and practical guidance in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) for self-supervised learning by introducing LeJEPA, a scalable and theoretically grounded training objective that achieves 79% accuracy on ImageNet-1k with a ViT-H/14 in linear evaluation.
Learning manipulable representations of the world and its dynamics is central to AI. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a promising blueprint, but lack of practical guidance and theory has led to ad-hoc R&D. We present a comprehensive theory of JEPAs and instantiate it in {\bf LeJEPA}, a lean, scalable, and theoretically grounded training objective. First, we identify the isotropic Gaussian as the optimal distribution that JEPAs' embeddings should follow to minimize downstream prediction risk. Second, we introduce a novel objective--{\bf Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization} (SIGReg)--to constrain embeddings to reach that ideal distribution. Combining the JEPA predictive loss with SIGReg yields LeJEPA with numerous theoretical and practical benefits: (i) single trade-off hyperparameter, (ii) linear time and memory complexity, (iii) stability across hyper-parameters, architectures (ResNets, ViTs, ConvNets) and domains, (iv) heuristics-free, e.g., no stop-gradient, no teacher-student, no hyper-parameter schedulers, and (v) distributed training-friendly implementation requiring only $\approx$50 lines of code. Our empirical validation covers 10+ datasets, 60+ architectures, all with varying scales and domains. As an example, using imagenet-1k for pretraining and linear evaluation with frozen backbone, LeJEPA reaches 79\% with a ViT-H/14. We hope that the simplicity and theory-friendly ecosystem offered by LeJEPA will reestablish self-supervised pre-training as a core pillar of AI research (\href{https://github.com/rbalestr-lab/lejepa}{GitHub repo}).