Le MuMo JEPA: Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Learnable Fusion Tokens
Organizations: IDLab, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University - imec, Belgium
Abstract
Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning visual representations without manual annotations, yet most methods still operate on a single modality and therefore miss the complementary structure available from heterogeneous sensors. We present Le MuMo JEPA, a self-supervised framework that learns unified representations from RGB images and aligned companion modalities. In our driving experiments, the second modality is camera-aligned LiDAR depth; we also evaluate RGB-thermal training and transfer on the Teledyne FLIR ADAS benchmark. Our approach extends LeJEPA to the multi-modal setting by learning fusion tokens that act as a latent bottleneck between modality-specific patch stems inside a shared transformer. Our default model employs a pruned fusion strategy: after an initial cross-modal attention layer, modality-specific tokens are dropped, forcing cross-modal information into the shared fusion-token grid as an efficient latent bottleneck before Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) is applied to the joint multimodal CLS embedding. On Waymo, Le MuMo JEPA gives the strongest performance-efficiency trade-off on downstream patch probes among the from-scratch multimodal baselines, improving CenterNet detection and dense depth while remaining competitive on segmentation. Under from-scratch training on nuScenes, Le MuMo JEPA remains the strongest model, and it also gives the best FLIR results, especially after Waymo-initialized fine-tuning. It also retains the best overall accuracy-efficiency balance in our study at substantially lower compute, memory, and estimated training time.
Figures & tables
| Method | mAP XY | Depth MAE | Seg. mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|
| LeJEPA [ 4 ] | 19.3 | 4.704 | 0.261 |
| LeJEPA encoder frozen [ 4 ] | 13.8 | 6.734 | 0.126 |
| LiDAR-only | 15.4 | 2.982 | 0.151 |
| LiDAR-only encoder frozen | 8.0 | 5.397 | 0.089 |
| Method | mAP XY | Depth MAE | Seg. mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Fusion RGBD | 18.1 | 4.767 | 0.248 |
| Late Fusion | 18.7 | 4.802 | 0.251 |
| FT-Pruned + VICReg [ 7 ] | 22.8 | 2.911 | 0.248 |
| FT-Persistent + SIGReg | 23.1 | 2.846 | 0.271 |
| FT-Pruned + SIGReg (3-pass) | 23.2 | 2.777 | 0.274 |
| Le MuMo JEPA | 23.6 | 2.860 | 0.275 |
| Method | Training Data | mAP XY | Depth MAE | mAP XZ | Seg. mIoU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeJEPA [ 4 ] | RGB | 19.3 | 4.704 | 4.9 | 0.261 |
| DINOv3 [ 22 ] | RGB | 15.2 | 5.314 | 3.5 | 0.239 |
| LiDAR-only | Depth | 15.4 | 2.982 | 4.0 | 0.151 |
| MultiMAE-SS [ 2 ] | RGB+Depth | 13.5 | 4.441 | 2.7 | 0.221 |
| MultiMAE-MT [ 2 ] | RGB+Depth | 13.7 | 3.583 | 2.9 | 0.262 |
| ImageBind [ 13 ] | RGB+Depth | 13.4 | 4.309 | 3.0 | 0.243 |
| Method | mAP XY | mAP XZ | Seg. mIoU | Depth MAE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MultiMAE-SS [ 2 ] | 6.95 | 1.66 | 0.195 | 5.736 |
| MultiMAE-MT [ 2 ] | 6.67 | 1.62 | 0.192 | 5.624 |
| ImageBind [ 13 ] | 6.86 | 1.57 | 0.198 | 5.912 |
| Le MuMo JEPA | 9.52 | 2.53 | 0.228 | 2.031 |
| Setting | Method | mAP50 | Car mAP50 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scratch | MultiMAE-SS [ 2 ] | 0.51 | 3.86 |
| Scratch | ImageBind [ 13 ] | 0.24 | 1.90 |
| Scratch | Le MuMo JEPA | 0.41 | 3.00 |
| Waymo FLIR | MultiMAE-SS [ 2 ] | 0.54 | 4.21 |
| Waymo FLIR | MultiMAE-MT [ 2 ] | 0.69 | 5.26 |
| Waymo FLIR | ImageBind [ 13 ] | 0.72 | 5.49 |
| Method | Time (min) | SSL FLOPs (PFLOPs) | VRAM (GB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| MultiMAE-SS [ 2 ] | 14.07 | 21.4 | 2.94 |
| Early Fusion RGBD | 18.70 | 72.9 | 6.15 |
| LeJEPA [ 4 ] | 18.73 | 72.7 | 6.01 |
| ImageBind [ 13 ] | 23.65 | 80.4 | 9.49 |
| Late Fusion | 34.72 | 144.9 | 11.41 |
| DINOv3 [ 22 ] | 37.72 | 108.8 | 8.70 |