MJEPA: A Simple and Scalable Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Audio-Visual Learning
Authors: Revant Teotia, Adrien Bardes, Michael Rabbat, Sumit Chopra, Matthew J. Muckley, Nicolas Ballas
Organizations: 1FAIR at Meta · 2New York University
Abstract
Self-supervised learning from large-scale video data has emerged as a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning. Since audio and visual streams naturally co-occur in video data, extending this success to jointly learn from both modalities is a natural next step, yet it remains challenging. Existing audio-visual self-supervised methods rely on modality-specific encoders and complex combinations of contrastive or reconstruction objectives, limiting cross-modal synergy and scalability. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a simple, modality-agnostic alternative, but have to date been applied primarily to individual modalities. We introduce MJEPA, a joint-embedding predictive architecture for audio-visual learning that uses a single, unified encoder for both modalities. Our approach uses only a single predictive objective, applied both within and across modalities. We show that cross-modal prediction is critical: without it, a shared encoder degrades below unimodal baselines; with it, each modality's representation benefits from the other. Our frozen ViT-g model outperforms the best prior frozen baseline by over 6.8 mAP on AudioSet-20K, surpasses fully finetuned models on ESC-50 and FSD50K, and is competitive on video benchmarks despite using 10x less video data.
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have emerged as a principled framework for self-supervised learning of world models in compact latent spaces, yet existing methods are fragmented: some predict masked parts of a single image in latent space (I-JEPA), others learn to predict global photometric transformations (Image World Models), while video-scale JEPAs predict future temporal states and are post-trained for action-conditioned planning (V-JEPA~2, DINO-World, DINO-WM). These objectives are treated as distinct recipes with separate encoders, predictors, and anti-collapse regularizers, hindering a single model from unifying image-level and video-level world modeling. We present UniJEPA, a unified JEPA that jointly learns photometric prediction (image-level transformations) and temporal prediction (video-level next-state dynamics) in one shared latent space. A single end-to-end objective, composed of a next-embedding prediction loss and a Gaussian regularizer, yields a provably anti-collapse encoder-predictor pair trainable from raw pixels without EMA, stop-gradient, or pre-trained encoders. We show that the same latent space supports controllable abstraction: photometric prediction learns invariant structure while temporal prediction learns equivariant dynamics. After action-conditioned post-training on offline trajectories, UniJEPA enables zero-shot planning by treating goal features as prediction targets. On image, video, and control benchmarks, UniJEPA matches or surpasses task-specific JEPAs while requiring a single loss hyperparameter, and plans up to tens of times faster than generative world models at comparable accuracy.
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) are a promising framework for self-supervised video representation learning, yet the behavior of auxiliary objectives in small-scale Video-JEPA training is not well characterized. We report a small-scale empirical study of 18 auxiliary objective variants for Video-JEPA across two pretraining regimes: single-dataset (UCF-101) and mixed-dataset (UCF-101 + Something-Something V2 + ImageNet-100). We evaluate frozen representations on three complementary benchmarks: Diving-48 (fine-grained motion), SomethingSomething V2 (temporal reasoning), and ImageNet-100 (appearance). Our experiments suggest that many auxiliary objectives exhibit capacity trade-offs: gains on one downstream capability often coincide with degradation on another. We then study FWM-HW-LD (Factorized World-Model with Hard-Region-Weighted Latent Dynamics), a training-time objective that separates the latent representation into appearance and dynamics subspaces and applies hard-region weighting to both JEPA prediction errors and latent dynamics errors. In our mixed-dataset setting, FWM-HW-LD improves ImageNet-100 by +5.92 and SSv2 by +3.21 percentage points relative to the reference baseline, while remaining within 0.30 percentage points on Diving-48. These results indicate that latent factorization is a useful direction for studying auxiliary-objective trade-offs in Video-JEPA.
Audio-visual understanding requires effective alignment between heterogeneous modalities, yet cross-modal correspondence remains challenging when temporally aligned audio and visual signals lack clear semantic correspondence. We propose to use text as a semantic anchor for audio-visual representation learning. To this end, we introduce a parameter-efficient adaptation framework built on frozen audio and visual encoders, centered on Text-Bridged Audio-Visual Adapter (TB-AVA), which enables text-mediated interaction between audio and visual streams. At the core of TB-AVA, Gated Semantic Modulation (GSM) selectively modulates feature channels based on text-inferred semantic relevance. We evaluate the proposed approach on multiple benchmarks, including AVE, AVS, and AVVP, where the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating text as an effective semantic anchor for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in audio-visual learning.