US-JEPA: A Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Ultrasound
Organizations: Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America · Medical Informatics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America · Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America · Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America · Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States of America
Abstract
Ultrasound (US) imaging poses unique challenges for representation learning due to its inherently noisy acquisition process. The low signal-to-noise ratio and stochastic speckle patterns hinder standard self-supervised learning methods relying on a pixel-level reconstruction objective. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) address this drawback by predicting masked latent representations rather than raw pixels. However, standard approaches depend on hyperparameter-brittle and computationally expensive online teachers updated via exponential moving average. We propose US-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that adopts the Static-teacher Asymmetric Latent Training (SALT) objective. By using a frozen, domain-specific teacher to provide stable latent targets, US-JEPA decouples student-teacher optimization and pushes the student to expand upon the semantic priors of the teacher. In addition, we provide the first rigorous comparison of all publicly available state-of-the-art ultrasound foundation models on UltraBench, a public dataset benchmark spanning multiple organs and pathological conditions. Under linear probing for diverse classification tasks, US-JEPA achieves performance competitive with or superior to domain-specific and universal vision foundation model baselines. Our results demonstrate that masked latent prediction provides a stable and efficient path toward robust ultrasound representations.