Temporal Representation Learning

Time Series Language Models (TSLMs) enable language-based understanding and reasoning over temporal data, yet a fundamental question remains: what information should their time-series representations preserve, and what variation should they factor out? Existing TSLMs typically expose the language model to a single representation, imposing a fixed inductive bias across downstream tasks. We instead introduce complementary representations as a design principle for time-series reasoning. Our model combines two visual views: line plots preserve absolute measurements and the observed coordinate frame, while normalized delay embeddings factor out positive amplitude rescaling and offsets while exposing temporal structure. Dedicated visual encoders integrate both views into a shared language model through visual tokens and multi-level feature fusion. Evaluation-time interventions verify that the two views exhibit distinct invariance profiles, while single-view ablations show that their combination is particularly beneficial beyond basic perception, with the large gains in prediction and reasoning. Built on Qwen3-VL-8B, our dual-view model improves overall TSRBench accuracy from 44.5% with line plots alone to 53.2%, substantially exceeding the strongest evaluated dedicated TSLM baseline at 36.7%. It further achieves 89.9% accuracy on TSExam and 86.8% numerical accuracy on multivariate ChatTS alignment. Together, these results demonstrate that complementary representations provide an effective design principle for general-purpose TSLMs, enabling models to exploit temporal structure without sacrificing access to the original measurement frame.

Time series such as recordings of human motion data often encode structure across multiple temporal scales, and when a latent state determining this sequence evolves, this structure needs to survive in the representation space for downstream use. Yet the currently prevalent attention-based encoders paired with sequence-level pooling have made single-vector, pointwise comparison the default mode of inference, discarding the trajectory a sequence traces through the representation space. We propose recovering this geometric structure directly, without relying on forecasting-based objectives, by training an encoder model (SemTAC) with a temporal-neighborhood contrastive loss: representations that satisfy local consistency everywhere must give rise to a coherent global structure, letting inference happen at temporal scales beyond those seen during training. We evaluate SemTAC against four baselines on a five-step motion sequence discrimination task: the same architecture trained with a classification or a standard contrastive objective, and two established self-supervised time-series methods, TS-TCC and TS2Vec. At the full sequence length all five are broadly competitive, but on incomplete, truncated sequences SemTAC holds a large advantage: a median F1 of 0.77 one step before the sequence completes, against 0.27-0.70 for the four baselines. A hyperparameter-matched ablation attributes this effect specifically to the temporal-contrastive objective. SemTAC's representation trajectories are also the only ones among these five to exhibit interpretable geometric structures, exceeding a no-structure chance baseline on a displacement-smoothness metric which we introduce. This is evidence that its objective, not classification accuracy alone, produces genuinely temporally-ordered trajectories.

Predicting the future evolution of a scene is a fundamental capability for world modeling. Recent work has shown that operating in the feature space of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) yields semantically rich representations that support diverse future scene understanding tasks. However, existing approaches rely on two-stage pipelines, where VFM features are first compressed using fixed dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA) or independently trained autoencoders, and a separate predictor is trained on top of the resulting frozen latent space. This decoupling between representation learning and temporal prediction, as well as approaches that apply predictors directly on raw VFM features, provides no guarantee that the latent space is structured for predictable dynamics. In this work, we propose Latent-Foresight, an end-to-end framework that jointly learns a latent tokenizer and a flow-based generative dynamics model, explicitly shaping the representation to support temporal predictability. To enable stable joint optimization, we introduce several key design choices that prevent latent collapse and align reconstruction with generative objectives. Extensive experiments show that our approach learns more temporally coherent latent representations and consistently outperforms two-stage baselines across multiple future scene understanding tasks and prediction horizons, while eliminating separate training stages, including during high-resolution adaptation. We provide the implementation code and model weights at https://github.com/Sta8is/Latent-Foresight

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) receive frames in sequential order and interpret how visual content evolves along the temporal axis, yet temporal reasoning remains a persistent weakness across architectures. Reversing the frame order of a video, a transformation that should invert temporal answers, often leaves the final prediction unchanged. We investigate where this failure originates by defining the temporal divergence vector $τ_l$, the layer-wise representational difference induced by reversing temporal order. Tracking its magnitude across layers reveals a consistent temporal divergence profile where the divergence peaks at intermediate layers and progressively diminishes toward the output. We confirm this peak is specific to temporal reasoning and functionally critical for predictions, establishing that VideoLLMs acquire temporal information at intermediate layers but fail to maintain it to the output. This progressive fading motivates our method, Temporal Activation Injection (TAI), which extracts $τ_l$ at the peak of the profile for each input and reinjects it into subsequent layers following the measured decay. TAI requires no training and consistently improves temporal reasoning across three VideoLLMs and four benchmarks with negligible impact on non-temporal tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Youngwoo-git/Before-It-Fades.

A goal that is close in space can be far away in time. Obstacles, terrain, and the agent's own capabilities determine how long it takes to get there. Yet, critics in contrastive and survival reinforcement learning do not measure the distances in their representation space in units of time. We therefore introduce ChronoSRL, which gives the critic's embeddings an explicit temporal geometry. The distance between state-action and goal embeddings is trained to match the time that the agent takes to reach the goal (goal-reaching time), while goals that were not reached, and goals from other trajectories, are pushed at least one discount horizon away. Furthermore, reaching a goal quickly once does not mean that reaching it is reliable in general, so the policy should not follow the temporal distance directly. Instead, we build on survival reinforcement learning and predict from our temporal embeddings not only the full distribution of goal-reaching times but also the time spent near the goal. Thereby, the policy is trained to favor actions that reach the goal sooner and more reliably and that keep the agent near it. ChronoSRL learns faster and reaches higher performance than contrastive, action-chunked contrastive, and survival reinforcement learning baselines on seven standard locomotion and navigation benchmarks, even with much smaller networks. To test the limits of self-supervised reinforcement learning, we introduce velocity tracking, goal-position reaching, and box climbing tasks with a quadruped robot in a realistic sim-to-real locomotion setup, and show how the shaping terms that are typical for robotics can be naturally incorporated into our framework. ChronoSRL is the only one of the tested self-supervised reinforcement learning methods that learns to stay at the commanded velocities and goal positions, and climbs the highest boxes.

Images capture the world at one moment, whereas video reveals how it changes. Image self-supervision learns spatial structure from a single moment, while video methods commonly learn temporal relationships inside a representation computed jointly from several frames. We ask whether watching a scene change can instead improve features available from one image without sacrificing the ability to represent video. We introduce W2Rep, a masked feature-prediction framework in which an independently encoded source image participates in prediction at the same or another moment. The predictor is conditioned on visible video context, the queried location, and the signed time interval between source and target. This gives the cross-frame objective two complementary roles: the image path learns features that remain useful across time, while the video path must gather evidence that is missing from the source image. Across model scales and downstream tasks, W2Rep improves frozen and fine-tuned recognition under our comparison protocol, while joint video encoding provides further gains over frame-wise aggregation. Controlled experiments show that these gains depend on directly updating the source-image features and on using both video context and temporal displacement. Overall, change across a video can supervise a visual encoder whose representations remain useful at either image or video granularity. Code is available at~https://wenooi.github.io/W2Rep.

Time-series carry structure simultaneously at multiple scales (fine-grained variation, mid-range motifs, and global properties) and downstream tasks operate at correspondingly different scales. Most existing self-supervised learning approaches supervise representations globally via instance-level contrastive losses and limited temporal neighborhood supervision, but do not explicitly exploit the structural hierarchy. We propose a learning framework that explicitly enforces a structural hierarchy across three scales independently: a local objective for token continuity, a mid-range objective for window-level motifs, and a global objective for sequence-level agreement. Realizing this framework requires the backbone to expose a representation at each scale; we introduce Progressive Memory Transformer (PMT), which augments a transformer with writable, window-aligned memory that exposes the mid-range scale alongside the token and sequence-level representations conventional transformers already provide. Across seven UCR/UEA/UCI classification benchmarks, a cue-retention probe, and forecasting benchmarks, PMT learns representations that probe well at the global, mid-range, and local scales---strong low-label classification (1--5% labels), competitive forecasting performance across multiple horizons, and quantitative and qualitative evidence that memory states capture mid-range motifs.

Modern information retrieval (IR) systems rarely represent time, yet many information needs depend on it: in clinical, journalistic, and legal search, when an event occurred can decide whether a document is relevant. Dense retrievers and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines match queries to documents well on topic but poorly on time, so they surface content that is on-topic yet temporally wrong. We introduce Temporal Textual Similarity (TTS), a task that measures how well two anchored texts align in time, independent of their topical similarity. We then present TEMPS (Temporal Embedding Model for Precise Search), a modular temporal branch that attaches to a frozen semantic retriever and trains on that signal. It resolves anchored temporal expressions to intervals and moment-matches each one to a Gaussian; the resulting ordering supervises an anchor-date-conditioned encoder, whose score we fuse with the semantic score at inference. Grounding supplies the supervision, so training uses no hand-labeled temporal data. The temporal score itself is the Gaussian-KL inclusion measure from distributional embeddings; what TEMPS adds is the grounding and the moment-matched supervision. On three temporal benchmarks, TEMPS improves MRR for every semantic backbone tested and, on TS- Retriever, lifts R@1 from 19.92 to 25.39 over the prior temporal state of the art.

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a promising paradigm for learning task-agnostic latent world models without visual reconstruction. However, standard JEPA training exhibits a strong inductive bias towards slow features, causing feature suppression and the collapse of latent representation. While inverse dynamics provides temporal anti-collapse, it relies on action labels and offers little incentive to embed general, unlabeled dynamics. We introduce Difference Image and Single image embedding Regularization (DISReg), a novel regularizer that builds on an inverse-dynamics-style module that predicts temporal difference image embeddings without any pixel reconstruction loss, encouraging balanced static and dynamic feature learning. DISReg consists of a static term that shapes the distribution of the image embedding and encourages slow features, and a dynamic term, which, unlike direct regularization on the embedding, imposes no constraint on the image embedding's shape or distribution and instead only incentivizes that dynamic features be present. By integrating this regularizer into a standard JEPA, we establish our new architecture, MotionJEPA. Latent probing demonstrates that MotionJEPA produces more complete representations than other methods, and our trajectory analysis shows it maintains geometrically simple latent embeddings with low curvature. We further show that MotionJEPA improves downstream planning success under static-background distractors across four environments.

We introduce Chronosphere, a spatio-temporal neural field that learns representations of climate. A central challenge in geographic representation learning is modeling environmental processes whose spatial and temporal complexity varies widely. Yet existing location encoders typically fix a single level of detail everywhere. Global bases such as spherical harmonics spread capacity uniformly across space and time. Localized bases resolve only predefined regions. Learned tessellations adapt, but are inefficient at representing higher frequencies. Chronosphere unifies these approaches, pairing an adaptive tessellation of learnable sites on the spacetime torus $S^2\times S^1$ with a shared bank of local basis functions. Both where capacity is placed and how much detail each region carries adapt to the data, across space and time. Trained to reconstruct climatology, Chronosphere matches or leads state-of-the-art location encoders across spatial and temporal tasks, with the largest gains under spatial and temporal transfer.

Seeing frames in order does not mean representing time. Modern VideoLMs receive ordered video streams, yet their main supervision acts on generated text rather than video-token representations where event dynamics should first emerge. This mismatch allows models to learn temporal answers from shortcuts such as objects, scenes, and language priors, without requiring internal video representations to capture event progression. To address this, we propose VT-Contrast, a representation-level temporal counterfactual objective for VideoLMs. Its design asks where temporal supervision should act and what temporal differences it should expose. VT-Contrast supervises selected late-layer last-frame video tokens, where temporal information is expected to be integrated before language generation, and contrasts order-preserving views with same-video reordered counterfactuals graded by Kendall tau distance. It requires no architectural changes, is compatible with diverse VideoLM training tasks, and improves overall performance across temporal understanding benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ANDgate99/VT-Contrast.

Self-supervised video foundation models learn rich spatiotemporal representations, yet it remains unclear what visual concepts these representations encode, where they emerge across transformer layers, and how they are geometrically organized. In this work, we tackle these three questions through a systematic layer-wise analysis of V-JEPA 2 and VideoMAE-v2. We leverage lightweight probes trained to discover three temporally grounded properties: (i) camera motion understanding, (ii) intuitive physics, and (iii) anomaly detection. Both models encode camera motion, with best results ($>90$ ROC AUC) emerging at 60-70% of network depth, and achieve moderate anomaly detection performance ($>60$ ROC AUC), but remain near chance on intuitive-physics tasks, suggesting a limited encoding of deeper physical reasoning. Beyond classification, we find that temporal features from individual videos form smooth low-dimensional trajectories in representation space, suggesting that camera motion is not only linearly decodable but also geometrically organized. Based on these results, we apply geometry-aware spline-based steering in the model's latent representations to interpolate camera motion, yielding steered videos with smoother trajectories and more coherent temporal progression than linear interpolation.

Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires vision-language-action (VLA) models to track scene states and their evolution beyond the current observation. However, simply conditioning policies on observation history does not guarantee that the history is effectively utilized: action supervision constrains what the policy should do, but only indirectly constrains what its history representations should retain. To resolve this, we present Temporal Forcing, a 4D representation alignment framework that explicitly supervises latent temporal states and their transitions. Specifically, we first introduce a history pathway that compresses past observations into compact latent tokens. We then align these tokens and current-frame features with geometric targets from a pretrained 4D foundation model, providing direct supervision at both the state and transition levels. The 4D foundation model and alignment heads are used only for training-time supervision. Temporal Forcing improves average success from 96.6% to 98.8% on LIBERO, with the largest gain on LIBERO-Long (93.8% to 97.2%), and from 53.5% to 62.8% across twelve RoboTwin 2.0 tasks. Furthermore, Temporal Forcing increases full-task success from 20.0% to 43.3% on a physical multi-stage hidden-placement task. Controlled experiments show that 4D representation alignment is crucial for making observation history beneficial to the model. Code will be publicly available.

Unsupervised action segmentation aims to discover latent action categories and their temporal organization without action annotations. Optimal transport-based methods provide structured frame-to-action assignments, however, their pseudo-label quality is fundamentally conditioned on the representation space used to construct the transport cost. We argue that reliable OT pseudo-labeling requires a representation geometry that is simultaneously sensitive to discriminative action changes and coherent along local temporal progressions. Based on this insight, we propose SpecT-OT, a spectral-temporal representation learning framework built upon an unbalanced optimal transport pseudo-labeling concept. SpecT-OT introduces a Spectral Reparameterization Projector (SRP), which parameterizes projector weights with fixed Fourier bases and learnable coefficients to improve the modeling of rapidly varying discriminative features, and Temporal Affinity Regularization (TAR), which imposes distance-aware, label-free constraints on pairwise frame affinities to stabilize local temporal structure. The two components jointly produce more discriminative and temporally stable transport costs, yielding more reliable pseudo-labels for iterative representation learning. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate strong performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. SpecT-OT achieves the best results on 13 of 15 metrics, including 4.1-point MoF and 7.4-point F1 gains over the baseline on Breakfast and Desktop Assembly, respectively.

While time evolves linearly, the geometry of neural embedding spaces is inherently multi-dimensional, often chaotic, and difficult to interpret. In principle, one could constrain an embedding space to a single temporal dimension; however, such a reduction would sacrifice performance on downstream tasks, as one-dimensional embeddings cannot retain sufficient expressive capacity. This paper asks whether it is possible to learn representations that preserve temporal structure while remaining effective for image and object retrieval, and answers this question by building the mathematical foundations of such a system. We propose Temporally Decomposable Image Representations (TDIR), a representation learning algorithm that decomposes historical photographs into separate date and content components through orthogonal subspaces. We define and prove the conditions under which such a decomposition is achievable, characterize the error incurred when those conditions are only partially met, and show that orthogonality between temporal and categorical subspaces emerges naturally from the joint optimization, without requiring it to be imposed explicitly. Beyond its geometric properties, TDIR enables a class of transitive operations on embedding spaces: the temporal information of one image can be extracted and injected into the representation of another, with no label supervision required. All theoretical properties are grounded and validated in the real-world problem of Composed Image Retrieval on historical photographs, where a query simultaneously specifies object content and a target time period, either through labels or through example images. This in-the-wild setting serves as a concrete backing for the propositions we derive, offering an intuitive and interpretable way to navigate photographic archives while maintaining competitive performance in both date estimation and object retrieval.

Modern sequence models, from Transformers to State Space Models, have enabled powerful generative modeling across diverse domains, yet they are typically trained to predict what happens while treating when it happens as a secondary concern. In data-mining settings where events are associated with explicit timing information, this separation can limit temporal reasoning, anomaly detection, and faithful reconstruction of event chronology. A common strategy is to treat timing as an auxiliary signal, training a separate timing model using representations learned solely for event prediction. However, this two-stage approach implicitly assumes that representations optimized for event prediction already contain sufficient temporal structure. We introduce ChronoSSM, an autoregressive State Space Model (SSM) that jointly models events and timestamps with a shared backbone trained using combined token and temporal generation objectives. We compare the joint regime, where temporal supervision updates the backbone, with the two-stage regime, where timing is learned only using the frozen event representations. Across four domains spanning dense and partial timestamp supervision, joint training consistently makes inter-arrival information more recoverable from frozen representations without any systematic degradation in content-generation quality overall. Our results show that temporal supervision can produce more temporally informative representations without materially degrading autoregressive event modeling.

Video temporal grounding (VTG) aims to localize the continuous video interval described by a natural-language query. However, current VLM-based methods typically produce this interval indirectly through two endpoint outputs, represented either as discrete timestamp tokens or continuous boundary coordinates. These formulations differ in how endpoints are encoded, but not in what is predicted: the event interval remains a derived object, while interval validity, duration, and interval-level similarity are handled only implicitly. We propose TimePLE, which reformulates VTG from endpoint prediction to interval-native grounding by predicting a single joint distribution over valid temporal intervals. TimePLE maps each interval to a point in a canonical position-duration square, where every support point corresponds to a valid span and neighboring points represent geometrically similar intervals. Given a video and query, the VLM generates a single latent <|TIMESPAN|> token whose hidden state is decoded into a joint interval distribution, refined through duration-aware coordinate correction, and converted into continuous boundaries. The same interval representation is used to encode input temporal anchors, aligning video-side temporal evidence with output-side span prediction. To reliably align the latent span representation with complete event intervals, we curate 90K-scale grounded samples and human-verify 3K-scale benchmark annotations. Experiments across four VTG benchmarks show that TimePLE consistently outperforms endpoint prediction baselines, achieving an average mIoU of 58.9, with clear gains on short-duration and medium-duration events.

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale -- and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

Self-supervised methods that learn representations and predict dynamics fully in the latent space, such as JEPA, have been shown to confuse slowly varying noise with the dynamical signals they aim to capture. Specifically, when noise features remain approximately constant within each trajectory, contrastive predictive objectives preferentially encode these features instead of the true latent variables governing the system. The learned representation then becomes dominated by trajectory-specific noise, so downstream performance degrades with noise strength and does not improve even as the number and duration of training trajectories increase. We argue that this failure is a property of the objective itself, shared by a long line of contrastive predictive objectives that sample negatives across trajectories. To illustrate this generality, we study the failure mode and its remedy in two settings: a standard SimCLR-style JEPA on a synthetic moving-dot dataset, and DySIB, a recently introduced method designed for extracting physically interpretable representations of dynamics, on movies of a rigid-body pendulum. When negatives are instead sampled within a single trajectory, the slow noise can no longer distinguish frames within that trajectory, removing the predictive shortcut. Training one encoder simultaneously on many such trajectories then forces it to encode the variables relevant for the dynamics, with longer trajectories yielding better representations even for strong slow noise. Our results point toward principles for designing contrastive predictive objectives in dynamical representation learning, especially for physical systems with noisy experimental observations.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in multi-image, multi-turn agentic settings where decisions depend on visual changes. However, in existing open-weight VLMs, visual comparisons happen only inside the language model, while the visual encoder itself remains stateless: each image is encoded independently, without access to the prior visual context. As a result, small but task-critical changes may be attenuated before the language model has a chance to compare them, especially when those changes do not affect the high-level semantics of the scene. We introduce a Stateful Visual Encoder, which conditions each visual representation on prior visual features. Under supervised finetuning, VLMs equipped with stateful encoders achieve consistent improvements on controlled tasks involving cross-image spatial aggregation, multi-object visual differencing, and visual trajectory behavior cloning. These improvements are consistent across input resolutions, language model sizes, and VLM backbones. Finally, we validate our model on real-world tasks, including longitudinal radiology, fine-grained image comparison, and remote sensing, where stateful encoders consistently improve generalist VLM baselines and can match or surpass specialized models in selected domains. Project page: https://statefulvisualencoders.github.io/

Transformer-based architectures have advanced sequence modeling in language and vision, yet general-purpose representation learning for heterogeneous multivariate time series remains underexplored. We introduce CHARM (Channel-Aware Representation Model), which incorporates channel-level textual descriptions into a Transformer encoder equivariant to channel order. CHARM is trained with a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and a novel loss promoting informative, temporally stable embeddings; latent-space prediction encourages robustness to sensor noise while description-aware gating provides interpretability through learned inter-channel relationships. Across anomaly detection, classification, and short- and long-term forecasting, the learned embeddings achieve strong performance using only a linear probe. Performance is driven primarily by the JEPA objective and conditioning architecture, with text descriptions serving as channel identifiers for cross-dataset generalization.

We present a novel method for learning interpretable representations of progressive time series, that is, data capturing irreversible state transitions such as degradation or task completion. Our approach uses a self-supervised contrastive objective to learn a low-dimensional latent space whose geometry is itself the interpretation: each observation becomes a point on a manifold anchored between two fixed orthogonal prototype vectors, and a trajectory becomes a path across that manifold. From this structure we read a latent compass, the polar coordinates (θ, r) of the latent vector, in which θ tracks the progression of the underlying state (e.g., from healthy to failed) and r identifies the active mode (e.g., the operating condition), without any proxy labels. We evaluate the approach against the state of the art on diverse domains, including industrial degradation, robotic tasks, and neural activity, validating three key capabilities: (1) end-state prediction, (2) multi-step forecasting, and (3) interpretable phase separation. Our method matches or improves over black-box counterparts on all of these while providing transparency about the underlying mechanisms. A simple linear regressor on top of the latent compass coordinates is competitive with deep architectures, direct quantitative evidence that the underlying state is encoded in a geometrically accessible form.

Video representation learning has seen tremendous progress in recent years. This has been driven by many factors, including the scale of training and the success of self-supervised models trained on next-frame prediction. While these factors have pushed the boundaries of what video models can do, they also introduce their own set of limitations. First, scaling video models can reach prohibitive costs, with recent models needing hundreds of years of video to be trained. Second, learning to predict the next frame (or embedding of the frame) naturally focuses on spatial information and as a result, video models still struggle with temporal understanding. In this paper we propose a novel approach that uses motion as a modality to alleviate both of these core issues. Given the motion in a video in the form of point tracks, we mask some of the tracks and use a masked autoencoder to reconstruct the missing tracks. This allows us to learn a representation in a self-supervised manner which we call TIME (Temporally-Informed Motion Embedding), and is focused on capturing temporal information. Also, as motion is inherently appearance-invariant, TIME needs far fewer examples to generalize well. As a result, without bells and whistles, on temporal tasks TIME performs on par with state-of-the-art models, using up to 4 orders of magnitude less training data. For general tasks, TIME can be used in combination with existing representations, and we observe that it leads to a significant improvement for V-JEPA 2, RVM and VideoMAE on standard benchmarks such as SSV2, EgoExo4D and Diving48. These results point to a new promising video paradigm for both more temporally-aware as well as more scalable models.

Current Video-LLM approaches for Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) typically rely on direct timestamp generation from an unstructured visual-token stream, often leading to brittle numerics and inconsistent boundaries. To address this, we propose Foresee-to-Ground (F2G), a framework that reformulates VTG as a verifiable Identify-then-Measure problem. F2G integrates Predictive Temporal Perception with Evidence-Driven Reasoning: it learns boundary-sensitive temporal representations to build a video-wide evidence pool of candidate event segments, and exposes these segments to the LLM as citable evidence units that bind boundary prediction to explicit event hypotheses. By decoupling event identification from precise boundary measurement, F2G stabilizes grounding and makes predictions verifiable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F2G consistently improves grounding accuracy across diverse benchmarks, transfers robustly across different Video-LLM backbones, and preserves general video understanding capabilities.

Self-supervised learning for time-series representation aims to reduce reliance on labeled data while maintaining strong downstream performance, yet many existing approaches incur high computational costs or rely on assumptions that do not hold across diverse temporal dynamics. In this work, we introduce Divide and Contrast (Di-COT), an unsupervised framework that avoids data augmentation and multiple encoder passes by contrasting informative substructures within a window rather than individual timesteps. Di-COT stochastically partitions each window into a small number of overlapping sub-blocks per iteration, enabling efficient and meaningful contrast while mitigating false positives during temporal transitions. To further improve scalability, we adopt a contrastive objective whose computation depends on the batch size and the number of sub-blocks, making loss computation independent of sequence length. Extensive experiments on six large-scale real-world datasets, as well as the UCR and UEA benchmarks, demonstrate that Di-COT learns semantically structured and transferable representations, achieving state-of-the-art performance on classification, clustering, $k$NN, and cross-dataset transfer, while substantially reducing training time. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sfi-norwai/Di-COT.

The Arrow-of-Time (AoT) task, determining whether a video plays forward or backward by recognizing temporal irreversibility, is one humans solve with near-perfect accuracy, yet frontier Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) perform only modestly above chance. This gap raises a key question: do visual backbones fail to encode temporal information, or does information bottleneck lie elsewhere in the Video-LLM architecture? We address this question by isolating the vision encoder from the Video-LLM and tracing temporal information across the encoder, projector, and LLM. We find that video-centric encoders with explicit temporal modeling encode strong temporal signals, whereas frame-centric encoders do not. However, when video-centric representations are passed through a standard Video-LLM architecture, performance often collapses, revealing a bottleneck of temporal information flow. We identify projector design as a key factor: Q-Former disrupts temporal information, while a time-preserved MLP projection substantially improves the LLM's access to such information. Our layer-wise analysis further shows temporal representation dynamics across encoder layers. Guided by these findings, we build a Video-LLM with temporal-aware video-centric encoder, time-preserved projector, and AoT supervision, surpassing human performance on AoT$_{PPB}$ with 98.1% accuracy, and improving broader temporal reasoning tasks by up to 6.0 points on VITATECS-Direction and 1.3 points on TVBench. Our results show that temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs requires both effective temporal encoding and reliable transfer of this information to the LLM.

Inspired by the human ability to understand and predict others, we study the applicability of Conditional Neural Processes (CNP) to the task of self-supervised multimodal action prediction in robotics. Following recent results regarding the ontogeny of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we focus on the preliminary objective of self-actions prediction. We find a good MNS-inspired model in the existing Deep Modality Blending Network (DMBN), able to reconstruct the visuo-motor sensory signal during a partially observed action sequence by leveraging the probabilistic generation of CNP. After a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we highlight its difficulties in generalizing to unseen action sequences, and identify the cause in its inner representation of time. Therefore, we propose a revised version, termed DMBN-Positional Time Encoding (DMBN-PTE), that facilitates learning a more robust representation of temporal information, and provide preliminary results of its effectiveness in expanding the applicability of the architecture. DMBN-PTE figures as a first step in the development of robotic systems that autonomously learn to forecast actions on longer time scales refining their predictions with incoming observations.

Temporal information has long been considered to be essential for perception. While there is extensive research on the role of image information for perceptual tasks, the role of the temporal dimension remains less well understood: What can we learn about the world from long-term motion information? What properties does long-term motion information have for visual learning? We leverage recent success in point-track estimation, which offers an excellent opportunity to learn temporal representations and experiment on a variety of perceptual tasks. We draw 3 clear lessons: 1) Long-term motion representations contain information to understand actions, but also objects, materials, and spatial information, often even better than images. 2) Long-term motion representations generalize far better than image representations in low-data settings and in zero-shot tasks. 3) The very low dimensionality of motion information makes motion representations a better trade-off between GFLOPs and accuracy than standard video representations, and used together they achieve higher performance than video representations alone. We hope these insights will pave the way for the design of future models that leverage the power of long-term motion information for perception.