JEPA Learns What the Mask Leaves Unrecoverable

Joint-embedding predictive architectures are unusually sensitive to how the input is masked: block masks work, scattered masks do not, and the explanations are empirical. We give a measurement account. A mask is a linear measurement, and in a compactly supported wavelet basis every atom whose support lies inside the hidden region falls in the measurement's null space and leaves no trace in the data. The JEPA loss asks only that the encoded context suffice for the target, so a target that a low-level prior can recover admits a shortcut, one the moving-average target encoder can make self-consistent. What removes the shortcut is the coarse-scale content the mask leaves unrecoverable, provid...

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