Predict and Reconstruct: Joint Objectives for Self-Supervised Language Representation Learning

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are effective for images, video, and audio, yet deterministic JEPA-style latent prediction has not become a standard objective for text encoders. We argue that this gap reflects a mismatch between squared-error latent prediction and the conditional structure of language. The key requirement is conditional concentration: given a context and target location, the target representation should lie near a single meaningful point. Local image prediction often satisfies this through spatial continuity, whereas masked text can admit multiple valid token or span completions whose representations need not share a coherent center. We formalize this mismatch through three conditions---predictability, non-collapse, and low conditional variance---and show how their failure creates centroid degeneracy and collapse pressure in text. Matched I-JEPA and T-JEPA experiments reveal the predicted sequence: mutual-information saturation and elevated target variance precede train--validation instability, effective-rank degeneration, cosine collapse, and poor downstream transfer. The same pattern appears across five independent data seeds, indicating that it is not a sampling artifact. These results do not rule out predictive learning for language; they show that text-compatible JEPA objectives must preserve multiple plausible completions rather than compress them into a single latent point.

Protein language models are trained primarily with masked language modeling (MLM), which predicts amino-acid identities at masked positions. We ask whether latent-space prediction can complement these token-level objectives under matched wall-clock budget. Across pretrained and random-init protein sequence encoders at 35--150M parameters, we find that the best protein-JEPA design is not all-position latent prediction but a variant: predicting latent targets only at masked positions, and retaining the MLM cross-entropy. We call this recipe masked-position MLM+JEPA. On a 16-task downstream suite (15 frozen linear probes plus SCOPe-40 zero-shot fold retrieval), under matched wall-clock budgets, this recipe wins more tasks than it loses against MLM-only continuation: 10 wins / 3 losses / 3 ties (hereafter W/L/T) on pretrained ESM2-35M, 11/2/3 on ESM2-150M while results in pretraining from scratch are mixed (6/8/2). Gains are seen for multiple models on 11 of 16 tasks, including stability, \b{eta}β\b{eta}-lactamase fitness, variant effect, intrinsic disorder, remote homology, enzyme classification, and SCOPe-40 fold retrieval. Tasks with more losses than wins are Fluorescence (TAPE) and Peptide-HLA Binding. All-position MLM+JEPA matches MLM-only overall but does not reproduce the masked-position gains. JEPA-only (no MLM) collapses in nearly every experiment. We conclude that JEPA, when combined with MLM, is competitive and can outperform pure MLM in pretraining and continued training, even under matched wall-clock budgets.

Token prediction is a central pre-training objective for modern language models. Despite its empirical success, why token prediction learns broadly useful representations remains incompletely understood. We develop a statistical framework connecting token prediction with representation geometry, encoder approximation, and downstream performance. Under a softmax prediction head, we show that accurate token prediction organizes token embeddings according to similarities between the distributions of contexts in which different token types appear, as measured by Hellinger distance, with explicit errors governed by prediction accuracy and token frequency. Meanwhile, the contextual representation provides a low-dimensional coordinate for the conditional distribution of the target token relative to these embeddings. We further introduce a self-consistency principle showing that repeated applications of a shared representation block can progressively refine the contextual representation without introducing additional block parameters. Among representations with the same prediction accuracy, this recurrent construction favors those that can be stably reconstructed from their contexts. Finally, we establish downstream guarantees for token generation, token community recovery, and classification by a linear probe, showing how prediction accuracy and recovered geometry translate into performance beyond the pre-training objective. Together, these results explain how the simple objective of predicting tokens can recover semantic geometry and produce broadly useful representations. A controlled simulation illustrates the theoretical mechanisms.